Aspectual Bootstrapping in Language Acquisition: Telicity and Transitivity

Two studies looked at whether children used transitivity as a structural cue to telicity semantics. Telicity comprehension was tested using an event-counting task (Wagner & Carey, 2003). Children watched animated movies depicting a goal (a dog pushes a ball into a can) achieved via 2 spatiotemporally distinct steps (the dog pushes the ball twice). The movies were described with either a telic or an atelic predicate, and the dependent measure was whether children counted the event's goals or steps. The predicates conveyed telic meaning with either a transitive structure (The girl painted a flower) or an intransitive structure (The vase broke), or atelic meaning with either a transitive (The dog pushed the ball) or an intransitive structure (The vase moved). Experiment 1 showed that 3- and 5-year-old children successfully understood telic and atelic descriptions, regardless of their syntactic form. Experiment 2 showed that 2-year-old children were successful overall, but showed a bias toward linking transitive structures to telic meanings. The results support the idea that telicity is among the semantic features that are linked to the transitive sentence frame and can be signaled by a structural cue.