Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Ditransitive alternation in adult input leads to multiple ways of syntactic-thematic mapping, posing challenges for child language acquisition. Semantic cues associated with arguments may guide children in overcoming this problem, as the semantic bootstrapping hypothesis assumes. This study attempts to explore whether such semantic cues are available and reliable in adult input that might help children to establish thematic-syntactic mappings of alternating ditransitive syntactic frames. We extracted all double-object sentences and post-object GeiP sentences from the adult input of 16 Mandarin-speaking children, which approximate the English double-object sentences and dative sentences, and coded both the indirect and direct objects along the dimensions of animacy, pronominality, givenness, and indefiniteness. The results show that the indirect and direct objects differ systematically across all dimensions. These distinctions are robust across syntactic frames. This suggests that cues for thematic-syntactic mapping are available in the input, which is consistent with the semantic bootstrapping hypothesis.