III. THE BODY REGION-SYNTACTIC FRAME PAIRINGS

1. Contingencies between verbs, body parts and argument structures in maternal and child speech: A corpus study in Telugu MadhaviLathaMaganti, Josita Maouene, TristaWitherspoon, Abigail Collinge, Rebecca Notterand Meghan Nesheim • Theorists studying other early syntactic development, notably languages with massive argument ellipses, have understandably had issues with the perspective that children learn the grammar of verbs from the number of arguments it occurs with and/or the probability of their appearance in a particular frame (Rispoli, 1995 [Japanese]; Narashiman, Budwig, and Murty, 2005 [Hindi]). • Recently, in English, new developmental evidence indicates correlations between verbs and body parts in an associative task (Maouene et al., 2008, 2012) and in children’s fMRIs (James and Maouene, 2009). Further, six syntactic patterns with which those verbs-body parts pairings are used in young children and their mothers show significant correlations (Maouene, et al., 2012). These findings link bodily effectors to verbs via a concrete core meaning, e.g., jumping is about legand appear mainly in the Vloc Structure. • Here, we build upon these relationships and bring new evidence from a corpus study of infant and maternal speech in Telugu, a Dravidian language from the South of India, which is known for dropping arguments. • We asked whether the verbs used in common syntactic frames are specifically linked to one of three main regions of the body: head, arm, leg. • The syntactic frames are provided below with one example between brackets: • V (tell! ) • V NP (finish your milk!), • V NP NP (give it to mommy!), • V NP LOC (put this over there), • VLOC (come here!), • VS (tell what he said) • VNP manner (How will you pray God?) • V with (I’ll cut with knife) • V manner (I brush like this) • V time (come soon) • Following the correlations found in English, we hypothesized that LEG, HEAD, AND ARM related verbs would be more likely to appear within some specific grammatical frame rather than some other frames. HEAD: VS, VNP (transitive) • ARM: V NP, V NP NP, V NP LOC (transitive) • LEG: V LOC (intransitive) • V : Head and arm • 2. Further, we hypothesize that cross-cultural and developmental differences will be evident between English and Telugu speakers. • Dialogues of 18 children (18 to 36-month-olds), 9 children with a mean age of 21.2 months, and 9 children with a mean age of 30.5 months, and their mothers, as well as other members of the household, were audio-recorded and some video-taped during free-play for a duration of 45-60 minutes which were then transcribed by a native Telugu speaker. The entire corpus consisted of 150 verb types. • A total of 7,363 utterances were hand-coded for six different groups of speakers, such as children, mothers and others within the household. • 55% of the verbs, that is 78 verbs (for comparison purposes with English data), were then submitted to 42 native Telugu speakers from ages 4.5 to 5.5 years to collect body part associations with verbs. • A verb was attributed to a body region of either HEAD, ARM or LEG if 50% or more of the children associated this verb with a single specific body part belonging to the one of those three body regions. • Three pairs of coders of the syntactic frames achieved a .80 interrater reliability coefficient. • TABLE 1 • Example of body parts coding in regions • TABLE 2 • Example of coding code • II. The FRAMES • 3) As in English, there is a preference for V frames and VNP frames in the four age groups for Telugu. The V LOC frame follows in third position. • 4) The youngest children use more V frames than VNP frames, but the order is reversed for the 3 older groups. • 5) Both groups of children have very few complex frames. No VNPNP frames or V with frames (instrumental), very few VS frames (1%). • 6) The Telugu mothers used complex frames a little more, such as: V NP LOC (3%), V NP MANNER (3%) but less so than the English mothers, confirming the drop in complex argument structures.The difference was significant for V NP, V NP MANNER, and V LOC on the Wilcoxon Sign Ranked test, p > .05. Introduction • III. THE BODY REGION-SYNTACTIC FRAME PAIRINGS • 7) A chi-square test of independence on the four groups collapsed shows that all of the verb frames were specifically associated with head, arm, and leg regions, χ2 (17) = 246.76, p < .001. • 8) The verb frame by body region showed the following associations in Telugu and in English: • Figure 3 a,b: On the left the Telugu speakers, on the right the English speakers and the body region-syntactic frame pairings. • 9) VLOC, an intransitive, is significantly about LEG in both languages • 10) The transitives are significantly correlated with the HEAD and the ARM regions in both languages • 11) VS is specifically about HEAD in both languages • 12) VNPNP (dative) and VNPLOC Is about ARM in both languages Figures 2a,b,c,d: proportions of the categories coded for the four age groups. Hypotheses Method Discussion • These results suggest that early on the body may be divided in a region for intransitive frame -- the leg region and transitive frames -- the upper body region composed of arm and head. This very simple distribution of the contingencies may help very young children to acquire the distinction between transitives and intransitives. • A possibility, close to the strong embodiment perspective (Barsalou,1999), is that children first learn the referential meaning of events through sensory and motor activities.For instance, locative expressions such as don’t run/jump/go there, or stay/wait/stand/ here [V Loc] could occur over multiple contexts while the child’s activity in space is either encouraged or restrained, and thus attention and control (whether automatic or not) on particular body parts such as the legsare a central focus of the child’s embodied mind. • Similarly, for handand head, it could be about attention to and inhibition or activation of the hands, the mouth, the eyes, the ears around objects or sounds (words) or feelings when the child hears mostly transitive structures. The attention and control around the hands would typically occur for sentences such as let’s build a tower [V NP], don’t drop the book here [V NP Loc], and throw me the ball [V NP NP]. The attention and control around the head region would be maximum when the children hear see/watch/eat/drink this [VNP] or I think you are right, He said he is going now [V S]. • The results suggest that for a language that drops argument structure, the correlations of certain body regions with specific frames might provide a complementary semantic boostrap to the syntactic one. • The results show that the division in three regions of the body is common to both English and Telugu, but that • the emphasis on a region may change ( Head in Telugu, Hand in English) for early verbs such that broad invariants • combine with cultural variability. Literature cited Barsalou, L. W. (1999). Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 577–660. James H. K. & Maouene, J. (2009). Auditory verb perception recruits motor systems in the developing brain.: an fMRI investigation. Developmental Science, F26-F34. Maouene, J. Hidaka, S. & Smith B. L. (2008) Body parts and early-learned verbs. Cognitive Science, 32, 1200-1216 Maouene J., Sethuraman, N. & Maouene, M. Correlations of action words, body parts and argument structure in maternal and child speech. Early Language Acquisition-ELA-2012 Conference, Lyon, France, December 5-7, 2012. James H. K. & Maouene, J. (2009). Auditory verb perception recruits motor systems in the developing brain: an fMRI investigation. Developmental Science, F26-F34. Narasimhan, B., Budwig, N., Murty, L. (2005). Argument realization in Hindi caregiver- child discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 37, 461 – 95. Pulvermuller, F., Harle, M., & Hummel, F. (2001). Walking or talking: behavioral and neurophysiological correlates of action verb processing. Brain and Language, 78, 143–168. Rispoli, Matthew, 1995. Missing arguments and the acquisition of predicate meaning. In: Tomasello, M.,Merriman, W. (Eds.), Beyond Names for Things. Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 331–354. • I. THE VERB DISTRIBUTION IN THE THREE BODY REGIONS • MOTHERS: Of the 1,019 verb types used, 40%, 19%, and 32% of verbs were associated with head region, arm region, and leg region, respectively. • CHILDREN: Of the 522 verb types used, 26%, 38%, and 26% of verbs were associated with head region, arm region, and leg region, respectively. • It may be noted that Telugu speaking mothers used syntactic frames associated with head region while children used frames associated with arm region. In English hand verbs dominate both in children and their mothers, an interesting cultural difference, we think. • A sample of verbs of the head region are: want, know, scold, sing, cry, like, look, watch, hear, yell, laugh,.. • A sample of verbs of the hand region are: swing, throw, hold, brush, clean, give, pull, push, scrub,… • Sample of leg verbs are: come, go, play, climb, sit, happen, move, run, slip, … Results • Acknowledgements • We thank Ms.Swarnalatha for collecting,transcribing and coding the databy hand. We also thank Ms. BinduMadhavi and Mr.Niyaz for lending assistance. Thanks to Prof.BapiRaju, Coordinator, CNCS, UoHyd for administrative support. Thanks to Mr. Ramachander and Ms. Shalini for help with this project. • We thank the families of the children who participated in data collection. • This research is funded by grants from the Department of Science and Technology, Govt of India (SR/ WOS/-A/ET- 143/2011).