Verb Learning in 14- and 18-Month-Old English-Learning Infants

He, Angela Xiaoxue; Lidz, Jeffrey

doi:10.1080/15475441.2017.1285238

Cited by 46 publications

(76 citation statements)

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“…Indeed, children may exploit the fact that an unknown word occurs in a noun context to infer that it probably refers to an object, while words occurring in verb contexts probably refer to actions (e.g., Gillette et al, 1999;Gleitman, 1990). For instance, He and Lidz (2014) showed that 18-month-olds (but not 14-month-olds) were able to infer that a novel word such as 'doke' referred to an object when listening to sentences such as "Look, it's a doke! ", and that a novel word such as 'pratch' referred to an action when listening to sentences such as "Look!…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phrasal prosody constrains syntactic analysis in toddlers

et al. 2017

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This study examined whether phrasal prosody can impact toddlers' syntactic analysis. French noun-verb homophones were used to create locally ambiguous test sentences (e.g., using the homophone as a noun: [le bébésouris] [a bien mangé] - [the baby mouse] [ate well] or using it as a verb: [le bébé] [sourità sa maman] - [the baby] [smiles to his mother], where brackets indicate prosodic phrase boundaries). Although both sentences start with the same words (le-bebe-/suʁi/), they can be disambiguated by the prosodic boundary that either directly precedes the critical word /suʁi/ when it is a verb, or directly follows it when it is a noun. Across two experiments using an intermodal preferential looking procedure, 28-month-olds (Exp. 1 and 2) and 20-month-olds (Exp. 2) listened to the beginnings of these test sentences while watching two images displayed side-by-side on a TV-screen: one associated with the noun interpretation of the ambiguous word (e.g., a mouse) and the other with the verb interpretation (e.g., a baby smiling). The results show that upon hearing the first words of these sentences, toddlers were able to correctly exploit prosodic information to access the syntactic structure of sentences, which in turn helped them to determine the syntactic category of the ambiguous word and to correctly identify its intended meaning: participants switched their eye-gaze toward the correct image based on the prosodic condition in which they heard the ambiguous target word. This provides evidence that during the first steps of language acquisition, toddlers are already able to exploit the prosodic structure of sentences to recover their syntactic structure and predict the syntactic category of upcoming words, an ability which would be extremely useful to discover the meaning of novel words.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phrasal prosody constrains syntactic analysis in toddlers

et al. 2017

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“…But modified subjects (e.g., ‘the nice tall boy’) pose too high of a processing demand for 2‐ and 3‐year‐olds . For younger children, at age 22 months, even a single content noun may pose too great a processing demand; He and Lidz found that in a simpler learning situation children performed better with ‘it’ or ‘that thing’ in subject position of a novel verb than the more informative but more difficult‐to‐process ‘the balloon.’ For older children, age 5 years, pronouns are sufficient, but contexts with no overt arguments (e.g., ‘Pilking!’) are not informative enough . Similarly, in a different paradigm, pilot studies suggest that novel nouns replacing the content nouns (e.g., ‘The dax is gonna pilk the blick’) may not support 2‐year‐olds’ acquisition of a novel verb, but may suffice for 3.5‐year‐olds .…”

Section: Identifying the Conceptmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…By 18 months of age, infants infer whether a novel word is a noun or verb, based on phrasal prosody (e.g., [la petite bamoule ] (the small bamoule ) vs. ‘[la petite] [ bamoule ]’ (the small (one) bamoules ), with ‘[]’ indicating phrasal prosodic boundaries) . Once a novel word's grammatical category is identified, the learner can narrow down their hypotheses about its meaning by utilizing relationships between grammatical and conceptual categories—for example, nouns typically name object kinds and verbs name event categories …”

Section: Finding the Wordsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…15 Once a novel word's grammatical category is identified, the learner can narrow down their hypotheses about its meaning by utilizing relationships between grammatical and conceptual categories-for example, nouns typically name object kinds and verbs name event categories. [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22] This is no trivial task. Naturalistic learning situations will typically be cluttered environments yielding a large hypothesis space from which learners must identify the target concept.…”

Section: Finding the Wordsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Word learning mechanisms

Arunachalam

2017

WIRES Cognitive Science

Self Cite

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How do children acquire the meanings of words? Many word learning mechanisms have been proposed to guide learners through this challenging task. Despite the availability of rich information in the learner's linguistic and extralinguistic input, the word-learning task is insurmountable without such strategies for filtering through and utilizing that information. Different kinds of words, such as nouns denoting object concepts and verbs denoting action concepts, require to some extent different kinds of information and, therefore, access to different kinds of mechanisms. We review some of these mechanisms to examine the relationship between the input that is available to learners and learners' intake of that input––that is, the organized, interpreted, and stored representations they form. We discuss how learners segment individual words from the speech stream and identify their grammatical categories, how they identify the concepts denoted by these words, and how they refine their initial representations of word meanings.

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“…Infants start to learn word and referent associations as early as 6–8 months (e.g., Tincoff & Jusczyk, ) and produce words by the end of their first year. A wide range of studies has suggested that word‐referent learning is influenced by multiple factors such as the learner's current level of vocabulary development (Werker, Fennell, Corcoran, & Stager, ) and language background (Burnham et al., ; Fennell, Byers‐Heinlein, & Werker, ; Singh, ; Singh et al., , ), the familiarity of the word being learned (Fennell & Werker, ), and the presence or absence of synchrony between word presentation and object motion during the task (Gogate, ; see also Gogate & Maganti, ; He & Lidz, for verb‐action learning). Phonetic properties are also known to be influential in word‐referent, especially word–object, learning.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Use of Pitch Accent in Word–Object Association by Monolingual Japanese Infants

Mugitani

Kobayashi

Hayashi

et al. 2018

Infancy

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This study investigated the lexical use of Japanese pitch accent in Japanese‐learning infants. A word–object association task revealed that 18‐month‐old infants succeeded in learning the associations between two nonsense objects paired with two nonsense words minimally distinguished by pitch pattern (Experiment 1). In contrast, 14‐month‐old infants failed (Experiment 2). Eighteen‐month‐old infants succeeded even for sounds that contained only the prosodic information (Experiment 3). However, a subsequent experiment revealed that 14‐month‐old infants succeeded in an easier single word–object task using pitch contrast (Experiment 4). These findings indicate that pitch pattern information is robustly available to 18‐month‐old Japanese monolingual infants in a minimal pair word‐learning situation, but only partially accessible in the same context for 14‐month‐old infants.

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Verb Learning in 14- and 18-Month-Old English-Learning Infants

Cited by 46 publications

References 44 publications

Phrasal prosody constrains syntactic analysis in toddlers

Phrasal prosody constrains syntactic analysis in toddlers

Word learning mechanisms

The Use of Pitch Accent in Word–Object Association by Monolingual Japanese Infants

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