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Infants use known verbs to learn novel nouns: Evidence from 15- and 19-month-olds
Ist Teil von
Cognition, 2014-04, Vol.131 (1), p.139-146
Ort / Verlag
Amsterdam: Elsevier B.V
Erscheinungsjahr
2014
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Elsevier ScienceDirect Journals Complete
Beschreibungen/Notizen
•We designed a new eyetracking task to study word learning at 19- and 15-months.•Can infants use known verbs to identify referents of novel nouns?•19-month-olds successfully used familiar verbs as cues when learning novel nouns.•15-month-olds failed to use familiar verbs as cues when learning novel nouns.•Infants’ eye movements show that this task requires significant cognitive effort.
Fluent speakers’ representations of verbs include semantic knowledge about the nouns that can serve as their arguments. These “selectional restrictions” of a verb can in principle be recruited to learn the meaning of a novel noun. For example, the sentence He ate the carambola licenses the inference that carambola refers to something edible. We ask whether 15- and 19-month-old infants can recruit their nascent verb lexicon to identify the referents of novel nouns that appear as the verbs’ subjects. We compared infants’ interpretation of a novel noun (e.g., the dax) in two conditions: one in which dax is presented as the subject of animate-selecting construction (e.g., The dax is crying), and the other in which dax is the subject of an animacy-neutral construction (e.g., The dax is right here). Results indicate that by 19months, infants use their representations of known verbs to inform the meaning of a novel noun that appears as its argument.