Chapter 1. Introduction
1.1 Background
1.1.2 Challenges to applying specificity hypotheses to acquisition issues
To argue that higher specificity implies higher perceptual salience and thus
facilitates verb learning, it needs to be explained how the effect operates
cross-linguistically and within a certain language. Cross-linguistically, it has been
observed that in some languages like Mandarin and Korean (Choi & Gopnik, 1995;
Tardif, 1996), early vocabulary consists of higher proportion of verbs than languages
like English. Many efforts have been made to investigate the reasons why some verbs
are acquired earlier while others are not in a particular language (Ma, Golinkoff,
Hirsh-Pasek, McDonough, & Tardif, 2009; Naigles & Hoff-Ginsberg, 1998). To employ
the notion of specificity to provide accounts for issues like why verbs in some
languages seem easier when compared to verbs in other languages or why some verbs
seem easier than others, two basic assumptions should be put into test. First, to explore
the role of specificity on language acquisition in terms of cross-linguistic differences,
one should demonstrate that verbs in this language are more specific before arguing that
verbs in this language are easier to learn as Tardif (2006a, 2006b) has made attempts to
argue that Mandarin verbs have higher specificity thus they are not as difficult as
English ones. Second, the assumption that specific verbs are easier to acquire should be
tested. Some counterexamples for the rationale are still waiting to be clarified.
1.1.2.1 Specificity in terms of cross-linguistic evidence
Though some researchers have proposed that verbs in some languages, such as
Mandarin and Tzeltal, have typologically higher specificity than verbs in other
languages (Brown, 2001; Tardif, 2006a, 2006b), it seems hard to define whether verbs
in a particular language have higher specificity. Some studies have provided some
counterexamples for Tardif’s typological observation on Chinese. Chu (2008), for
instance, argued that English has finer distinctions between motion verbs. Similarly,
Chen (2005) illustrated this by the fact that Mandarin Chinese has two main walking
verbs (zǒu ‘walk’ and mài ‘march’) whereas English has a variety of walking verbs such
as walk, march, plod, step, stride, tiptoe, and tramp. In addition, Gao and Cheng (2003)
contrasted “verbs of contact by impact” by comparing bilingual dictionary entries and
suggested that English has many “hit verbs”, which do not necessarily have equivalents
in Chinese such as bang, bash, batter, beat, dash, drum, hammer, hit, kick, knock, lash,
pound, rap, slap, smack, smash, strike, tamp, tap, thump, thwack, and whack, whereas
Chinese speakers tend to use adverbs that refer to the manner or degree or use nouns
that refer to instrument to narrow down an action referent (e.g., qīng-dǎ ‘hit tenderly’,
yòng-lì-dì-dǎ ‘hit hard’, yòng chu í -zǐ qiāo ‘hit with a hammer’, měng-liè-qiāo-dǎ ‘hit
severely’).
An alternative account is that typological differences involving specificity may
display in semantic domains instead of a whole word class. In other words, Chinese
may have higher specificity for a particular semantic domain than English and the
opposite is true for another semantic domain. Observational findings supported that
there might be an asymmetrical pattern for typological specificity. For instance, as for
hit verbs, English speakers tend to use more hit verbs while Mandarin speakers tend to
use general verbs like dǎ ‘hit’ (Gao and Cheng 2003). On the other hand, concerning
carrying verbs, Mandarin has more specific verbs than English (Tardif 2006).
Moreover, the debate on the typological pattern of specificity may be related to the
discrepancy between actual language uses and the language system. One can always
find extremely specific words in a particular language but it also matters whether most
speakers understand and use it. Though existing in a language, some jargons or
archaisms may be used and known by only a small group of people. For example,
Chinese has a number of cooking terms such as wén ‘cook with little heat.’ Yet it
remains unclear how verbs with low frequency in input affect the process of lexical
acquisition.
This study does not aim to solve these issues on typological pattern of specificity
although this study was motivated by the observation of the differences in learning
patterns between English-speaking and Mandarin-speaking children. Instead, this study
aims to independently examine the effect of specificity on language acquisition by
experimental manipulation. That is, the study explored the role of lexical specificity in a
general learning mechanism though the complexity of this issue was recognized.
1.1.2.2 Specificity within a certain language
Empirical evidence from some languages has shown that specificity is not always
a facilitative factor for word learning. For instance, the Mandarin verb tiào ‘jump’ is
more specific than dòng ‘move’ and the age of acquisition (sometimes abbreviated as
AoA in literatures) of tiào is earlier than dòng, which confirms Tardif’s prediction that
verbs with high specificity are acquired earlier. However, the two verbs, qiáo ‘glance’
and dèng ‘stare’ are more specific than kàn ‘look’ but the AoA of kàn is 18 months
whereas AoA of qiáo ‘glance’ is later than 27 months (Chen & Cheung 2007).
Counterexamples like these have challenged the hypothesis that specificity in verb
meaning facilitates word learning.
In addition, specificity of words for adults might not be consistent with that for
children. For instance, some early words are very general such as dǎ ‘hit’ with an early
AoA (17 months) in Mandarin (Chen 2008). Advocates of the specificity hypothesis
may argue that children grasp only a part of verb meaning and use it in limited contexts.
In other words, children may treat general words as specific words (underextension),
which is the opposition of the prediction of the light verb hypothesis or the semantic
feature hypothesis proposed by Clark (1973)2. This discrepancy of findings may result
from different methods to assess performance of word learning (e.g., comprehension
and production). The following section will discuss different assessing methods about
lexical development and how this study assessed children’s performance in the mapping
task.