The understanding and acquisition of symmetrical predicates.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Miller, Carol Anne.

Contributor:

Gleitman, Henry, advisor.

Gleitman, Lila R., advisor.

University of Pennsylvania.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Developmental psychology.

Linguistics.

0290.

0620.

Penn dissertations--Psychology.

Psychology--Penn dissertations.

Local Subjects:

Penn dissertations--Psychology.

Psychology--Penn dissertations.

0290.

0620.

Physical Description:

127 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 56-03A.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

Investigating the nature of the mental lexicon is an enormous task that must be approached by dividing it into smaller parts. In this dissertation, we study the way words are classified within the lexicon. Specifically, we investigate the lexical property of symmetry. Symmetrical predicates are ones which relate two or more entities such that a reciprocal relation is entailed. That is, for all X and Y under a symmetrical relation R, if X R Y, then Y R X. Three studies demonstrate the existence of a lexical-semantic property of symmetry, showing that subjects' intuitions regarding symmetrical predicates correspond to the behavior of those predicates in certain diagnostic syntactic constructions. Two further studies show that both adults and preschool children differentiate between symmetrical and asymmetrical predicates. However, in directional (transitive) sentences, even symmetrical predicates seem to be interpreted asymmetrically to some degree. Two studies investigate the way directional sentences are interpreted and show that the sentence structure itself causes an asymmetrical interpretation. A final study addresses the issue of how language learners know when to assign a new predicate to the symmetrical category. Subjects receive information about novel verbs both from sentence structure characteristics, and from visual event characteristics, and the influence of these factors is compared. In the discussion, the way in which sentence structure and word meaning interact to yield sentence interpretations is discussed. This discussion, in combination with evidence that adults can use both sentence structure and visual properties of an event to learn whether a new verb is symmetrical or asymmetrical, leads us to conclude that symmetry is a general lexical property according to which entries in the mental lexicon are classified.

Notes:

Thesis (Ph.D. in Psychology) -- Graduate School of Arts and sciences, University of Pennsylvania, 1994.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-03, Section: A, page: 0910.

Co-Advisers: Lila R. Gleitman; Henry Gleitman.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.