Infants use known verbs to learn novel nouns: evidence from 15- and 19-month-olds.

نویسندگان

  • Brock Ferguson
  • Eileen Graf
  • Sandra R Waxman
چکیده

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.

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

When Veps Cry: Two-Year-Olds Efficiently Learn Novel Words from Linguistic Contexts Alone

We assessed 24-month-old infants’ lexical processing efficiency for both novel and familiar words. Prior work documented that 19-month-olds successfully identify referents of familiar words (e.g., The dog is so little) as well as novel words whose meanings were informed only by the surrounding sentence (e.g., The vep is crying), but that the speed with which they identify the referents of novel...

متن کامل

Running Head: VERBS AND NOUNS 24-Month-Old Infants’ Interpretations of Novel Verbs and Nouns in Dynamic Scenes

Recent evidence reveals that infants share with mature language users an expectation that different kinds of words (e.g., nouns, adjectives) refer to different aspects of a scene (e.g., object categories, object properties). Infants’ expectations for nouns and adjectives have been demonstrated, but the developmental trajectory underlying infants’ discovery of verbs has been more elusive. Althou...

متن کامل

Twenty four-month-old infants' interpretations of novel verbs and nouns in dynamic scenes.

The current experiments address several concerns, both empirical and theoretical in nature, that have surfaced within the verb learning literature. They begin to reconcile what, until now, has been a large and largely unexplained gap between infants' well-documented ability to acquire verbs in the natural course of their lives and their rather surprising failures to do so in many laboratory-bas...

متن کامل

Receptive grammatical knowledge of familiar content words and inflection in 16-month- olds

This study examines 16-month-olds’ understanding of word order and inflectional properties of familiar nouns and verbs. Infants preferred grammatical sentences over ungrammatical sentences when the ungrammaticality was cued by both misplaced inflection and word order reversal of nouns and verbs. Infants were also sensitive to inflection alone as a cue to grammaticality, but not word order alone...

متن کامل

Form and Context 1 Running Head: Form and Context Grammatical Form and Semantic Context in Verb Learning

Decades of research have documented that young word learners have more difficulty learning verbs than nouns. Nonetheless, recent evidence has uncovered conditions under which children as young as 24 months succeed. Here, we focus in on the kind of linguistic information that undergirds 24-month-olds’ success. We introduced 24month-olds to novel words (either nouns or verbs) as they watched dyna...

متن کامل

ذخیره در منابع من


  با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

عنوان ژورنال:
  • Cognition

دوره 131 1  شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2014