In this study, we explore how children learn causatives from the language they are exposed to in their everyday lives. Previous research has argued that argument structure is a crucial facilitator for learning causatives. Here, we examine the role of argument structure in the acquisition of morphological and lexical causatives. We use Turkish as a test case which allows argument ellipsis and ask whether reliable argument expression is a key factor in learning causatives. We use longitudinal data of 7 children spanning from 8 to 36 months of age and their surrounding environment. We show that ellipsis in child-directed speech is pervasive for both lexical and morphological causatives. However, such pervasive ellipsis does not seem to influence the acquisition process. This suggests that argument structure may not play a major role in the learning of causatives in a natural learning environment.

中文翻译：

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尽管普遍存在省略号，但儿童仍会学习致病词：来自土耳其语的证据

在这项研究中，我们探讨了儿童如何从他们在日常生活中接触到的语言中学习致病词。以前的研究认为，论证结构是学习因果关系的重要促进因素。在这里，我们研究了论证结构在形态学和词汇致病词的获得中的作用。我们使用土耳其语作为允许使用论点省略号的测试案例，并询问可靠的论证表达是否是学习因果关系的关键因素。我们使用了 7 名年龄在 8 至 36 个月之间的儿童及其周围环境的纵向数据。我们表明，在儿童导向的语音中，省略号对于词汇和形态学的因果关系来说都是普遍的。然而，这种普遍存在的省略号似乎并不影响收购过程。这表明，在自然学习环境中，论证结构在因果关系的学习中可能没有发挥重要作用。