The role of input cues in acquiring unaccusative and unergative verbs: Verb learning experiments with Mandarin-speaking toddlers

Children make use of various information in linguistic input to learn verbs, including syntactic distribution and semantic features. Within the intransitive verb class, unaccusative and unergative verbs differ in distribution with respect to word order as well as in semantic features such as telicity. Both the distributional and semantic information might act as cues for learning the two types of verbs. In this study, we investigate how Mandarin-speaking toddlers make use of these input cues to learn the unaccusative-unergative distinction. In verb learning experiments using the visual fixation procedure, 31-month-old toddlers were taught two novel verb items (V UA and V UE ) and then tested on whether they were able to distinguish them. Results show that participants learned the difference between the two novel verbs based on the word-order cue and the telicity cue separately, but not simultaneously. Our findings provide evidence for toddlers’ ability to employ distributional and semantic information in the input during verb learning, shedding light on the learning mechanisms of verb argument structure.