Event
June Choe will be defending their dissertation, "Acquiring words beyond the basic level" on Thursday, June 26th at 11am EST.
The defense will take place in the Linguistics department library, and on Zoom.
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Title: Acquiring words beyond the basic level
Supervisor: Anna Papafragou
Committee: Kathryn Schuler, Florian Schwarz
Early word learning is characterized by mapping labels for objects to the so-called “basic” level of description, such as dog. This basic-level bias presents a challenge for the eventual acquisition of words that differ in semantic specificity, such as the narrower subordinate-level (e.g., dalmatian) and the broader superordinate-level (e.g., animal) nouns. Previous literature has typically treated the acquisition of these kinds of nouns as disparate problems. Subordinate nouns are often characterized in terms of the perceptual distinctiveness of their referents and thus their meanings are thought to be acquired via the convergence of physical cues from the world. By contrast, superordinate nouns are thought to be initially difficult due to the unavailability of the corresponding concepts but trivially acquired via induction upon conceptual maturity in later childhood. Of course, such views have not gone unchallenged – a parallel line of work has reported strong contributions from the language input in overcoming the basic-level bias in acquisition, raising questions about the scope of the perceptual and conceptual challenges truly posed by learning words beyond the basic level.
Building on this linguistic perspective, this dissertation develops a pragmatically-motivated framework that unifies the seemingly disparate challenges to the acquisition of subordinate and superordinate nouns. Starting from the premise that hierarchical noun meanings form a scale on the basis of their semantic specificity, this position predicts that the acquisition of these words is guided by the accessibility and relevance of specific linguistic-semantic alternatives that pragmatically constrain the generalization of word meanings. A series of studies tests the consequences of this pragmatic position for the acquisition and interpretation of subordinate and superordinate nouns. Beginning with subordinates, Study 1 (Chapter 2) shows that semantic alternatives modulate subordinate-level conjectures in a word learning study with adults. Similarly, Study 2 (Chapter 3) demonstrates that children also generate such contrastive inferences in word learning, and are additionally able to integrate inferences about speaker knowledge. Turning to superordinates, Study 3 (Chapter 4) shows that the distribution of superordinate nouns in the input both reflects, and is discoverable from, their semantic-pragmatic properties. Lastly, Study 4 (Chapter 5) shows that children are sensitive to the pragmatic conditions that license when superordinate-level meanings are talked about. In conclusion, this dissertation demonstrates that the acquisition and use of words at different levels of specificity is in large part characterized by the task of reasoning about a speaker’s intent in their choice of a specific word among relevant alternatives. These findings further our understanding of the pragmatic forces that shape the acquisition of hierarchical noun meanings, and the development of adult-like pragmatic competence that governs the unspoken rules of their usage.