Learning the meaning of verbs: insights from Quechua

Ellen H. Courtney, University of Texas at El Paso

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This is a preprint of an article submitted for consideration in First Language © 2008 [copyright Sage]; First Language is available online at http://fla.sagepub.com/

Abstract

Largely based on observations of English-speaking children, investigators have proposed constraints on verb learning, e.g., syntactic bootstrapping, the principle of uniqueness, and innate semantic-conceptual categories. Children produce overgeneralization errors as they acquire verb meaning, and data from some languages reveal an intriguing asymmetry: children use intransitive verbs transitively, while seldom using causative-transitive verbs intransitively.

This study presents experimental evidence corroborating Courtney’s (2002) finding that Quechua-speaking children’s overgeneralization errors observe the same asymmetry. The transitive variants of change-of-state verbs were elicited from 30 Peruvian children, aged 2;8-4;11. The ensuing discussion offers an account of the asymmetry and considers learnability issues in Quechua verb acquisition, specifically the usefulness of constraints proposed for children acquiring English, which is typologically very different from Quechua.