Toddlers Default to Canonical Surface-to-Meaning Mapping When Learning Verbs

Previous work has shown that toddlers readily encode each noun in the sentence as a distinct argument of the verb. However, languages allow multiple mappings between form and meaning that do not fit this canon-ical format. Two experiments examined French 28-month-olds ’ interpretation of right-dislocated sentences (nouni-verb, nouni) where the presence of clear, language-specific cues should block such a canonical mapping. Toddlers (N = 96) interpreted novel verbs embedded in these sentences as transitive, disregarding prosodic cues to dislocation (Experiment 1) but correctly interpreted right-dislocated sentences containing well-known verbs (Experiment 2). These results suggest that toddlers can integrate multiple cues in ideal conditions, but default to canonical surface-to-meaning mapping when extracting structural information about novel verbs in semantically impoverished conditions. One of the most remarkable properties of language is that it is deeply productive as a result of listen-ers ’ remarkable resilience to novelty. For example, even a sentence containing unknown words is fairly interpretable. Faced with, “The glop mooped the nuck, ” we readily assume that there was an agen