Recent work exploring children's verb learning in the laboratory has generated some interesting contradictions. Some studies have found that children as old as 4 years old are unable to reliably map a novel verb to an action (e.g., Kersten & Smith, 2002; Imai, Haryu, & Okada, 2005), even though much younger children routinely acquire and produce verbs in a naturalistic setting. In contrast, Waxman, Lidz, Braun, and Lavin (under review) found that infants as young as 24 months could identify an action category across dynamic scenes and map a novel verb (but not a novel noun) to that action category. In the current research, I extend the work of Waxman et al. by independently manipulating three factors -- multiple familiarization scenes, multiple object categories, and explicit contrast -- in a forced choice verb-learning task with 3-year-olds. Children watched one or more familiarization scenes in which an actor performed a simple, durative action with a familiar object. Scenes were labeled with either a novel verb (e.g., "The man is larping a balloon!") or novel noun (e.g., "The man is waving a larp!"). A contrast phase showed the same actor perform a different action with a different object, labeled in the negative (e.g., "Uh, he's not larping that!"), which was followed by another familiarization scene. At test, children were shown two scenes simultaneously: one scene showed the actor performing a new action with the familiar object, and the other showed the actor performing the familiar action with a new object. Participants were asked to point to the scene representing the novel word. Children learned verbs best when all three sources of information -- multiple familiarization scenes, multiple object categories, and contrast -- were available. When only one was available, contrast appeared to be the most useful. The use of multiple object categories across scenes facilitated verb learning more than a single object category. Children deprived of all three sources of information did not learn verbs at all, but did learn nouns. Ways in which the information required for learning a verb may differ from that required for learning a noun are discussed

Last modified

• 05/25/2018

Creator

• Thomas B Piccin

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2QH6G

Subject

• Psychology

Keyword

• cross-situational learning
• contrast
• verb learning
• language acquisition
• early word learning

Date created

• 2007-05-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright