Infants’ ability to learn and parse words

Infants' ability to parse continuous actions.

In a series of 3 experiments, the authors examined 6- and 8-month-old infants' capacities to detect target actions in a continuous action sequence. In Experiment 1, infants were habituated to 2 different target actions and subsequently were presented with 2 continuous action sequences that either included or did not include the familiar target actions. Infants looked significantly longer at the...

Infants' ability to parse continuous actions: Further evidence

In two experiments, we examined 6- and 8-month-old infants' capacities to detect target actions in a continuous action sequence. The primary question was whether action segments consisting of an event (e.g., occlusion, containment) are more salient than action segments consisting of a transition (e.g., bounce, slide). In Experiment 1, infants were habituated to long action sequences. After meet...

Contingent Labeling after Infants' Pointing Helps Infants Learn Words

Previous studies provide suggestive evidence that infants’ pointing gesture is associated with language development, but cannot verify a causal role of pointing in word learning. The present study thus experimentally manipulated infants’ production of pointing, and responses to pointing, to investigate the role of pointing in infants’ performance of forming novel word-object associations. Sixte...

The effect of teaching the etymology of words to learn and reinforce vocabulary by Iranian children

This study was an attempt to investigate the effect of teaching morphemes on young EFLlearners. To this end, 23 young EFL learners in two different classes who studied at intermediatelevel were selected to participate in the present study. The participants were divided into twogroups. One of the groups was treated as experimental and the other one was considered as thecontrol group. Furthermore...

How Infants Use the Words They Know to Learn New Words