Verb argument structure overgeneralisations for the English intransitive and transitive constructions: Grammaticality judgments, production priming and a meta-analytic synthesis

We used a multi-method approach to investigate how children avoid (or retreat from) argument structure overgeneralisation errors (e.g. *You giggled me). Experiment 1investigated how semantic and statistical constraints (preemption and entrenchment) influence children’s and adults’ judgments of the grammatical acceptability of 120 verbs in transitive and intransitive sentences. Experiment 2 used syntactic priming to elicit overgeneralisation errors from children (aged 5-6) to investigate whether the same constraints operate in production. For judgments, the data showed effects of semantics and statistics for all ages. This finding was confirmed by an updated meta-analytic synthesis of data from these and other constructions (which also revealed some by-construction differences). For production, only an effect of statistical preemption was observed, and only for transitivisation errors with intransitive-only verbs (e.g. *The man laughed the girl). We conclude that semantic and statistical effects are real, but are obscured by particular features of the present production task.