The role of object labels and familiarity in Japanese children’s verb learning

1. Introduction In order to learn a new word, children first need to determine what form class the word belongs to, and find an appropriate referent in the situation in which the word is introduced. They then must determine what other instances the word should be (or should not be) generalized to. In doing so, children need to realize that generalization of words are governed by different principles across different word classes. An object can appear in many different actions. For example, a ball can be rolled, thrown, or kicked. Thus, when a noun is introduced in the a scene in which the a referent object is used in a particular action, in extending it, children must know that the noun should be generalized to the an object of the same kind even when it is used in a different action. Likewise, an action can be done with many different objects. For example, we can throw a ball, a Frisbee, a stone, a disk, or almost anything we can lift up with our hands. Thus, in extending a verb that has been mapped onto an action involving an object, the object must be separated from the action and be treated as a variable that can be changed. Of course, verbs put some constraints on the types of arguments they can be used with, but within the range of the semantic constraints, different objects can be the argument of the verb. Thus, in generalizing a noun and a verb, children need to focus on different kinds of similarity across different scenes. Suppose that a child hears the verb " throw " while watching her father throw a ball at one time and sees her father toss a ball at another time. At still a different time, the child sees a boy throw a Frisbee to a dog. The second scene is very similar to the first because the objects—the father and a ball—are the same. Nonetheless, the child cannot generalize the verb " throw " to this scene. Instead, she needs to apply the verb " throw " to the third scene, even though the objects in the scene are totally different. That is, to represent the meaning of a verb, children need to align relevant components of action events, compare across different scenes, focus only on the similarity of the higher order relation between the objects, and ignore the sameness …