A Cross-Linguistic Study of Word-Mapping in 18- to 20-Month-Old Infants

Abstract

This study was designed to examine whether infants acquiring languages that place a differential emphasis on nouns and verbs, focus their attention on motions or objects in the presence of a novel word. An infant-controlled habituation paradigm was used to teach 18-to 20-month-old English-, French-, and Japanese-speaking infants' novel words for events. Infants were habituated to two word-event pairings and then presented with new combinations that involved a familiar word with a new object or motion, or both. Children could map the novel word to both the object and the motion, despite the differential salience of object and motion words in their native language. A control experiment with no label confirmed that both object and motion changes were detectable.Nouns form the majority of children's early vocabulary, and are typically acquired earlier than other word classes (Bates et al.

Early verb learning in 20-month-old Japanese-speaking children

“…In Katerelos et al (2010), Japanese-speaking children aged 1; 8 looked significantly longer at the agent switch trial but not at the action switch trial, indicating that they tended to map the novel word onto the agent when both the agent and action interpretations were available. recovered at the word switch trial) mapped novel words onto the action and not onto the agent.…”

“…In contrast, in the single word experiment (Katerelos et al, 2003(Katerelos et al, , 2010, the children recovered at both the word and the agent switch trials but not at the action switch trial, as shown in Figure 2. The results indicated that none of the effects were significant (ps>0 .…”

“…The design and findings reported by Katerelos et al (2003;2010) provide an interesting opportunity to test children's ability to use morphosyntactic cues in word learning. If children alter their preference to map the novel word onto an action when it is presented in a verb sentence frame, this would provide evidence that they can use morphosyntactic cues in word learning.…”

Individual differences in nonlinguistic event categorization predict later motion verb comprehension

“…What are the factors that influence children's ability to map words onto events? A hybrid theory of language development, the Emergentist Coalition Model (ECM), may help unpack the complexity of verb learning (Hollich et al, 2000;Katerelos, Poulin-Dubois, Oshima-Takane, 2011). The ECM suggests that children have access to a number of co-occurring cues for word learning but hone in on those cues at different developmental time points.…”

Are Nouns Learned Before Verbs? Infants Provide Insight Into a Long‐Standing Debate

“…Even before infants begin to produce verbs in earnest, they have begun to form representations of the kinds of concepts underlying both noun (object‐based) and verb (action‐based) meaning. For example, in one experiment, infants were shown dynamic scenes (e.g., a novel cartoon creature jumping back and forth over a fence) while listening repeatedly to a novel word, presented alone (e.g., “Blick!”; Katerelos, Poulin‐Dubois, & Oshima‐Takane, ). At test, infants viewed this now‐familiar scene and a new scene in which either the participant object changed (e.g., a new creature jumping over a fence) or the action changed (e.g., the same creature now racing across a platform).…”