Action Speaks Louder Than Words: Young Children Differentially Weight Perceptual, Social, and Linguistic Cues to Learn Verbs

Abstract

This paper explores how children use two possible solutions to the verb-mapping problem: attention to perceptually salient actions and attention to social and linguistic information (speaker cues). Twenty-two-month-olds attached a verb to one of two actions when perceptual cues (presence/absence of a result) coincided with speaker cues but not when these cues were placed into conflict (Experiment 1), and not when both possible referent actions were perceptually salient (Experiment 2). By 34 months, children were able to override perceptual cues to learn the name of an action that was not perceptually salient (Experiment 3). Results demonstrate an early reliance on perceptual information for verb mapping and an emerging tendency to weight speaker information more heavily over developmental time.

Word Learning in Infant- and Adult-Directed Speech

“…We predicted that older children and children with larger vocabularies rely on IDS in word learning less than younger children, since children’s preference for IDS generally decreases across development (e.g., Cooper & Aslin, 1994; Hirsh-Pasek, Treiman, & Schneiderman, 1984). This prediction is also consistent with the Emergent Coalition Model (ECM), which proposes that children first rely primarily on perceptual cues (in this case, exaggerated prosodic cues), followed by social cues, and finally linguistic cues to learn novel words (Brandone, Pence, Golinkoff, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2007; Golinkoff & Hirsh-Pasek, 2006; Hollich, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, 2000; Nurmsoo & Bloom, 2008). Thus, older children and developmentally advanced children with larger vocabularies are predicted to rely less on the exaggerated IDS prosodic cues as they have already shifted to the use of social and linguistic cues.…”

“…Then, as vocabulary is slowly amassed, children begin to free themselves from the use of perceptual cues such as object salience (Golinkoff & Hirsh-Pasek, 2006) or the prosodic exaggerations of IDS. Finally, children will be able to learn words even from overheard speech (Akhtar, Jipson, & Callanan, 2001), and with referents that they do not find particularly salient or attractive (Hollich et al, 2000; Brandone et al, 2007). …”

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

“…Brandone et al, 2007). 5 s helped reduce the chance that children would look away before hearing the first linguistic stimulus.…”

Imageability predicts the age of acquisition of verbs in Chinese children

“…As children's early verb learning is partially governed by perceptual salience (e.g. Brandone, Pence, Golinkoff & Hirsh-Pasek, 2007), verbs that name physical actions are more salient and observable than verbs that name events with little physical motion (e.g. running vs. thinking ).…”