14‐Month‐Old Infants Form Novel Word—Spatial Relation Associations

Abstract

This study explored 14-month-old infants' ability to form novel word-spatial relation associations. During habituation, infants heard 1 novel word (e.g., teek) while viewing dynamic containment events (i.e., Big Bird placed in a box) and, on other habituation trials, a second novel word (e.g., blick) while viewing dynamic support events (i.e., Big Bird placed on the box). Each novel word was presented in a sentence (e.g., "She's putting Big Bird teek the box"). During the test, infants discriminated an event that maintained the habituation word-relation pairing from one that presented a switch in this pairing. The results indicate that 14-month-olds can learn to form wordrelation associations quickly, requiring only a few minutes of experience with each word-relation pairing.Although word learning is the end result of a number of linguistic, cognitive, and social abilities, infants also can learn novel labels under impoverished conditions, relying on a few or even a single source of information to link a novel word to its referent. For example, infants can use the co-occurrence of a novel word and a referent as the sole source of information for associating the word to an object (Schafer & Plunkett, 1998;Werker, Cohen, Lloyd, Casasola, & Stager, 1998) or an action (Casasola & Cohen, 2000). When cooccurrence is insufficient to specify the referent of a novel word, 16-month-old infants use a speaker's gaze to disambiguate which of two objects is being labeled (Baldwin, 1993). Hence, when it comes to word learning, infants are quite resourceful in finding information to link novel words to their corresponding referents. Thus far, research on early word learning has focused mainly on infants' acquisition of object labels and the range of cues they to use to map a novel word onto an object (e.g., Baldwin & Moses, 2001;Hollich et al., 2000). The question explored in this study is whether infants as young as 14 months can be resourceful in using limited sources of information, and limited exposure to a novel word and an event, to link a novel word to a spatial relation.Rather than relying on the spatial words produced by children (e.g., Choi & Bowerman, 1991;Tomasello, 1987), more recent studies on the acquisition of spatial language have examined infants' and toddlers' comprehension of spatial morphemes. For example, Meints, Plunkett, Harris, and Dimmock (2002) found that 15-month-old infants comprehend on as corresponding to a cat sitting on the center of a table and under as corresponding to the cat sitting under the table. Similarly, Choi, McDonough, Bowerman, and Mandler (1999) found that English-and Korean-learning toddlers of 18 to 23 months comprehend spatial terms according to the semantic pattern of their ambient language. They found that Englishlearning toddlers comprehended in as referring to one object being placed in a containment relation to a second object, whereas Korean-learning toddlers correctly comprehended the Korean morpheme kkita as referring to one object being placed in a tight-fit rel...

Mapping novel labels to actions: How the rhythm of words guides infants’ learning

“…Our results are consistent with prior studies demonstrating that between 7 and 17 months, infants begin to discriminate, categorize, and attend to path or manner (Casasola et al, 2003;Pruden et al, 2004;Pulverman & Golinkoff, 2004;Pulverman et al, 2008) and are beginning to associate novel forms with actions (Casasola & Cohen, 2000;Casasola & Wilbourn, 2004). Moreover, our findings add to the growing body of research demonstrating infants' ability to attend to iambic stress in a variety of tasks.…”

“…Future research should investigate how stress might help with other types of verbs, such as manner, and also whether this associative ability is evident at younger ages. We chose 16 months because we know that between 14 and 17 months, English-learning infants attend to both manner and path in nonlinguistic tasks (Pulverman et al, 2008), and around this age, infants are developing the ability to associate novel labels with actions (Casasola & Cohen, 2000;Casasola & Wilbourn, 2004). It may be the case that salient linguistic information such as word stress facilitates this mapping at even younger ages.…”

When Less Is More: How Infants Learn to Form an Abstract Categorical Representation of Support

“…Second, previous studies demonstrated that 6‐month‐old infants discriminate a containment relation from other relations on the basis of the relation and not on the basis of the figure's occlusion (Casasola et al, 2003). Likewise, 14‐month‐old infants tested on their ability to link a novel word to a containment relation or a support relation discriminated between the relations from different angles, including a high angle in which there was no difference in the occlusion amount of the figure in the containment and support events (Casasola & Wilbourn, in press). Together, these findings strongly suggest that infants in the current study were responding to the spatial relation and were not responding solely on the basis of simple perceptual cues.…”

What does syntax say about space? 2-year-olds use sentence structure to learn new prepositions

“…Children could accomplish this separation in part by detecting the function morphemes and meanings characteristic of each category (Gerken & McIntosh, 1993;Maratsos, 1982;Mintz, 2002;Waxman & Booth, 2003). Santelmann and Jusczyk (1998) reported that 18-month-olds detect the dependency between is and -ing in verb phrases; children also begin to learn spatial prepositions early in the second year (Casasola & Wilbourn, 2004;Meints, Plunkett, Harris, & Dimmock, 2002). Such findings reveal hints of the morphological and semantic knowledge relevant to disentangling verbs from prepositions.…”