To become productive language users, learners must assign words to grammatical categories such as noun, verb or adjective. This supports linguistic productivity as newly learned items inherit the syntactic properties of their categories. However, in many languages, some words may appear in multiple grammatical categories. This ambicategoricality poses a potentially serious problem for children trying to sort words into grammatical categories. Although this phenomenon is central to arguments for and against various theories of syntactic category acquisition, the nature of ambicategoricality in language development has been only cursorily examined. These studies ask three questions about language learners' experience with words that are ambiguous with regard to lexical category. First, what is children's experience with these words like? How frequently are they heard in each category and what perceptual cues might parents use to differentiate between uses in different categories? Second, what perceptual abilities do learners have that might mitigate the ambicategoricality problem? Finally, how do children use those words that are potentially ambiguous? Is children's usage of such words related to that of their caregivers? The findings indicate that language learners do hear words used in more than one lexical category, although not as frequently as they could, and that parents reliably use prosodic cues such as pitch and duration to distinguish noun and verb uses of the same word. Infants are sensitive to these prosodic distinctions in a habituation task and language learners use words in more than one grammatical category in their early utterances. Children's use of ambicategorical words is directly related to that of their mothers, suggesting that children may use their sensitivity to the perceptual cues that differentiate these categories to distinguish between noun and verb uses of the same words. This explanation cannot account for the strong correlations between parent and child usage of verb/adjective or adjective/noun ambiguous words, as infants are not sensitive to prosodic differences in those types of ambiguity. Learners may use multiple cues, including prosody, to avoid the potential problems posed by ambicategoricality.
Conwell, Erin Rose,
"Resolving ambicategoricality in language acquisition: The role of perceptual cues"
(2008).
Cognitive Sciences Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0PR7TCC
