Individual differences in nonlinguistic event categorization predict later motion verb comprehension

Abstract

This study probes how individual differences in early event perception predict later verb knowledge. At Time 1, when infants were 13 to 15months of age, they saw videotaped silent scenes performed by a human actor. The goal was to see whether infants could form categories of path (a figure's trajectory with respect to a ground object) and manner (how an action is performed). Infants either saw the same manner (e.g., jogging) taking place across three different paths (around, through, and behind) or saw the same path (e.g., around a tent) taking place across three different manners (running, crawling, and walking). After familiarization, either the path or the manner was changed and visual fixation was monitored using preferential looking. At Time 2, the same children were tested on their comprehension of verbs in a two-choice pointing task showing two simultaneous actions (e.g., running vs. jumping). Success at categorization of path and manner at Time 1 predicted verb comprehension at Time 2, even when taking language knowledge at both time points into account. These preliminary results represent headway in identifying the factors that may contribute to children's language learning. They suggest that skill in categorizing semantic components present in nonlinguistic events is predictive of children's later verb vocabulary.

A shared neural substrate for action verbs and observed actions in human posterior parietal cortex

“…The link between visual representations of actions and action verbs fits with current views of how infants learn action verbs by mapping words onto conceptualizations of events (37). Infants can distinguish action exemplars (running, marching, and jumping) independently of the actors (38) and that this ability predicts the use of action verbs at 2 years of age (39). Furthermore, it provides an explanation for why infants learn verbs later than nouns (40), as the corresponding visual representations are in different visual pathways.…”

Prelinguistic foundations of verb learning: Infants discriminate and categorize dynamic human actions

“…In fact, research from our labs using a different set of realistic stimuli suggests that there is a positive relationship between infants’ ability to form nonlinguistic categories of event components at 13 to 15 months of age and their subsequent verb learning in the third year of life (Konishi, Stahl, Golinkoff, & Hirsh-Pasek, under review). Furthermore, that relationship appears to be independent of the number of nouns children have at that later time.…”

Lexical Processing of Nouns and Verbs at 36 Months of Age Predicts Concurrent and Later Vocabulary and School Readiness

“…The lexical processing task involved 13 trials. The target words were chosen by Konishi et al (2016) who used a version of the task with 2.5-year-olds. They chose the words from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (MCDI;Fenson et al, 1993) and from nouns and verbs known by 3-to 5-year-olds in Masterson, Druks, and Galliene (2008).…”

“…The visual stimuli were also created by Konishi et al (2016) and consisted of images of objects and animals (noun trials) and videos of people performing everyday actions (verb trials). The pairing of each target with a distracter was identical to Konishi et al (2016).…”

“…However, a methodological caveat calls this hypothesis into question. While prior work testing noun referents in lexical processing tasks has almost exclusively used static images to depict those referents, most verb referents are best depicted using dynamic action scenes in which participants can view the referent event unfold over time (e.g., Konishi, Stahl, Golinkoff, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2016;Valleau, Konishi, Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, & Arunachalam, 2018). We know less about how eye gaze measures of lexical processing with dynamic scenes are related to outcomes.…”