We tested two hypotheses about how English-speaking children learn to avoid making argument structure errors such as Don't giggle me. The first is that children base their usage of verbs on membership in narrow-range semantic classes (Pinker 1989). The second is that children make use of indirect negative evidence in the form of alternative expressions that preempt tendencies to overgeneralize. Ninety-six children (32 each at 2.5, 4.5, and 6/7 years of age) were introduced to two nonce verbs, one as a transitive verb and one as an intransitive verb. One verb was from a semantic class that can be used both transitively and intransitively while the other was from a fixed transitivity class. Half of the children were given preempting alternatives with both verbs; for example, they heard a verb in a simple transitive construction (as in Ernie's meeking the car) and then they also heard it in a passive construction—which enabled them to answer the question 'What's happening with the car?' with It's getting meeked (rather than generalizing to the intransitive construction with It's meeking). We found empirical support for the constraining role of verb classes and of preemption, but only for children 4.5 years of age and older. Results are discussed in terms of a model of syntactic development in which children begin with lexically specific linguistic constructions and only gradually learn to differentiate verbs as lexical items from argument structure constructions as abstract linguistic entities.
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