The Department of Cognitive Science
cordially invites you to the public defense of the PhD thesis
Developing an Understanding of Gradable Complementaries
by
Levente Madarász
Monday, February
16, 3
P.M. CET
Room C323 (CEU, Quellenstrasse 51, 1100 Vienna)
Zoom:
https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/97977961120?pwd=hB46T8WUzoyVgytP2Nz0EC2iNWGM8O.1
Meeting ID: 979 7796 1120
Passcode: 432875
PRIMARY SUPERVISOR: Ernő Téglás (CEU)
SECONDARY SUPERVISOR: Dan Sperber (CEU)
Members of the Dissertation Committee:
Christophe Heintz Chair, CEU
Krysten
Syrett,
Professor, Department of Linguistics and the Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS), at Rutgers University as External Examiner
Nausicaa
Pouscoulous,
Associate Professor, University College London as External Examiner
*Anyone not affiliated with CEU wishing to attend in-person in Vienna
must RSVP here
to get access to the lecture hall.
ABSTRACT |Research
in the area of semantics highlighted that certain gradable adjective pairs might relate to each other in a complementary fashion (e.g.,
clean:dirty,
dry:wet,
smooth:rough, etc., Cruse 1980; Rotstein and Winter 2004; Kennedy and McNally 2005, a.o.). The results of empirical works have suggested that not only adults, but younger children too are sensitive to the distinction between such gradable complementaries
and adjectives falling into different typological groups (Frazier, Clifton Jr, and Stolterfoht 2008; Syrett, Kennedy, and Lidz 2010; Syrett and Lidz 2010, a.o.). This dissertation contributes to these findings by addressing different developmental aspects
of these expressions. Utilizing a novel choice task, Study 1 aimed to illuminate how children judge gradable complementaries when those modify plural entities. Relying on both corpus data and a parental survey, Study 2 explores how gradable complementary terms
appear in the productive vocabulary of children acquiring Hungarian, and follows
up on the findings with an experimental investigation. Lastly, with an other novel choice task, Study 3 aims to establish if upon identifying the meaning of a previously unheard adjective children
benefit from an information that it is not applicable to some degrees of a gradable complementary attribute. The observations made in these studies are indicative in the following respects: Study 1 showed that the way 4-year-old children judged the applicability
of the attributes clean and dirty applied to a set of items differed from how 5-year-olds approached the same problem. Study 2 indicated that when considering gradable complementary pairs, children acquiring Hungarian have a tendency to
verbalize the partial members of these terms prior to their total counterparts. While Study 3 indicated that older (but not younger) 4-year-old children might be more likely to benefit from cues
pertaining to the inapplicability of an item with an interim degree of a minimal-standard attribute in identifying the meaning of a previously unheard adjective. Considered together, the observations made in these studies add to previous results in that they
show how aspects of the use, production and identification of such descriptions develop, often into
the late preschool years.
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