Thematic role assignment in resultative constructions in English- and Mandarin-learning children

Resultative constructions (RCs), which express a causal relation between two events, differ in English and Mandarin with respect to the interpretation of the object NP. Imagine a scenario where John wiped some dirt off a table, cleaning the table but inadvertantly dirtying the cloth. Here, English allows (1) but not (2). Mandarin, however, allows both. The object NP must be the patient of the main verb in English, but can have other interpretations in Mandarin.
(1) a. John wiped the table clean.
b. Zhangsan ca ganjing le zhuozi.
Zhangsan wipe clean LE table
(2) a.*John wiped the cloth dirty
b. Zhangsan ca zang le mabu.
Zhangsan wipe dirty LE cloth
Using a noun-learning task, we show that 2.5-year-old English- and Mandarin-learners are aware of the language-appropriate interpretations of the object NP. Participants (n=96) saw causative events, where an agent uses one novel object (designated instrument) to act on another (designated patient), resulting in both objects entering the same result state. Meanwhile, participants heard RCs like ‘She bumped the teeg awake’, where the object NP was a novel word. After this familiarization, children were shown the instrument and the patient on separate sides of the screen, and we asked “Which one is the teeg”? Reference-resolution of the “teeg” at test indicates thematic role assignment during familiarization. We found English-learners more often chose the designated patient than the designated instrument as the referent, whereas Mandarin-learners chose the two equally often. An adult control experiment revealed the same pattern. These findings show that by 2.5-years of age, children are beginning to learn the interpretation of NPs in complex clauses. They also suggest potential difficulties for theories of verb learning and syntax learning that presuppose a one-to-one mapping between a verb’s thematic relations and the number of NPs in a clause containing that verb.