Experiments
Non-Contextual Denominal Experiment
The Non-Contextual Denominal Experiment investigates the comprehension of semi-nonce denominal verbs in the absence of syntactic context. It aims to see how adults and children use and understand denominal verbs such as to cherry or to fox, what kind of interpretations they prefer. The results shows that both children and adults exhibit an intransitive bias in production. Given children's general transitive bias, we interpret this as indicating sensitivity to incorporation and awareness that denominals are covert transitives (Hale & Keyser 2002). In addition, both children and adults generally prefer to give interpretations that associate an activity with the entity denoted by the nominal root the denominal is derived from. However, for denominals derived from animal names, adults almost exclusively interpret them as figurative (e.g., 'to behave like a fox'), while half of the answers given by children are literal (e.g. 'to catch foxes').
Contextual Denominal Experiment
The Contextual Denominal Experiment investigates the role of context-sensitivity for the interpretation of semi-nonce denominal verbs. We investigate, for instance, whether, in a context such as Mary cherried when Tom told her she is pretty, one is more likely to interpret to cherry as meaning 'to become like a cherry/ to blush'. We show that, while adults show sensitivity to pragmatic context, giving more figurative ('become/behave like') interpretations in figurative-biased contexts, children seem to be literal-biased, preferring interpretations that involve the actual entity expressed by the nominal root even in figurative-biased contexts.
Contextual
Denominal
Paraphrase Experiment
The Contextual Denominal Paraphrase Experiment investigates whether children and adults derive more figurative readings in figurative contexts if sentences explicitly spell out the internal structure of denominal verbs (e.g., to become like a cherry instead of to cherry). We show that, while not fully adult-like, children are much more context-sensitive in their interpretations when exposed to explicit denominal paraphrases than to denominal paraphrases.
