Conceptual Foundations for Verb Learning: Celebrating the Event

Pulverman, Rachel; Hirsh‐Pasek, Kathy; Golinkoff, Roberta Michnick; Pruden, Shannon M.; Salkind, Sara J.

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195170009.003.0006

Cited by 32 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…Surprising as it may seem, this finding is perfectly in keeping with infants' predominant interest for things in motion (Slater 1989: 59;Casasola et al, 2006;Pulverman et al, 2006).…”

Section: Motionsupporting

confidence: 61%

CATEGORIES IN THE MAKING: Assessing the role of semantics in the acquisition of noun and verb categories

Rossi

Parisse

2012

French Language Studies

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Little is known about what guides children in their acquisition of grammatical categories. This paper investigates how semantic knowledge could be involved in discovering these categories, thus confronting two competing hypotheses: are semantic categories innate, or are they developed in a piecemeal fashion? We tested for regular associations between basic semantic dimensions and the development of the founding categories of noun and verb. Six perceptually based semantic dimensions (Parisse and Poulain, 2010), shared by nouns and verbs but potentially distinctive, are coded in the productions of three children aged 1;06 to 2;06. Our results suggest that semantic dimensions do not offer an entry into the early differentiation of noun and verb categories.

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“…Surprising as it may seem, this finding is perfectly in keeping with infants' predominant interest for things in motion (Slater 1989: 59;Casasola et al, 2006;Pulverman et al, 2006).…”

Section: Motionsupporting

confidence: 61%

CATEGORIES IN THE MAKING: Assessing the role of semantics in the acquisition of noun and verb categories

Rossi

Parisse

2012

French Language Studies

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“…ability to learn more verbs (Pulverman, Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, Pruden, & Salkind, 2006). These findings taken together suggest that learning language dampens the detection of categorical differences that are not encoded in one's native tongue.…”

mentioning

confidence: 76%

Trading Spaces: Carving up Events for Learning Language

Göksun

Hirsh‐Pasek

Golinkoff

2010

Perspect Psychol Sci

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Relational terms (e.g., verbs and prepositions) are the cornerstone of language development, bringing together two distinct fields: linguistic theory and infants’ event processing. To acquire relational terms such as run, walk, in, and on, infants must first perceive and conceptualize components of dynamic events such as containment—support, path—manner, source—goal, and figure—ground. Infants must then uncover how the particular language they are learning encodes these constructs. This review addresses the interaction of language learning with infants’ conceptualization of these nonlinguistic spatial event components. We present the thesis that infants start with language-general nonlinguistic constructs that are gradually refined and tuned to the requirements of their native language. In effect, infants are trading spaces, maintaining their sensitivity to some relational distinctions while dampening other distinctions, depending on how their native language expresses these constructs.

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“…Recent research suggests that infants readily attend to the manner in which agents move themselves (e.g., Casasola, Hohenstein, & Naigles, 2003;Pruden, Hirsh-Pasek, Maguire, & Meyer, 2004;Pulverman & Golinkoff, 2004;Pulverman, Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, Pruden, & Salkind, 2006;Pulverman, Sootsman, Golinkoff, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2003). In one experiment (e.g., Pulverman & Golinkoff, 2004), for example, 7-month-old infants were habituated to a computer-animated event in which a starfish-shaped agent moved in a particular manner (e.g., spinning) along a fixed path between two locations; infants dishabituated in test when the agent changed its manner of motion (e.g., performing jumping jacks).…”

Section: Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can 9.5-month-old infants attribute to an agent a disposition to perform a particular action on objects?

Song

Baillargeon

2007

Acta Psychologica

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The present research examined whether 9.5-month-old infants can attribute to an agent a disposition to perform a particular action on objects, and can then use this disposition to predict which of two new objects-one that can be used to perform the action and one that cannot-the agent is likely to reach for next. The infants first received familiarization trials in which they watched an agent slide either three (Experiments 1 and 3) or six (Experiment 2) different objects forward and backward on an apparatus floor. During test, the infants saw two new identical objects placed side by side: one stood inside a short frame that left little room for sliding, and the other stood inside a longer frame that left ample room for sliding. The infants who saw the agent slide six different objects attributed to her a disposition to slide objects: they expected her to select the "slidable" as opposed to the "unslidable" test object, and they looked reliably longer when she did not. In contrast, the infants who saw the agent slide only three different objects looked about equally when she selected either test object. These results add to recent evidence that infants in the first year of life can attribute dispositions to agents, and can use these dispositions to help predict agents' actions in new contexts.

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Conceptual Foundations for Verb Learning: Celebrating the Event

Cited by 32 publications

References 46 publications

CATEGORIES IN THE MAKING: Assessing the role of semantics in the acquisition of noun and verb categories

CATEGORIES IN THE MAKING: Assessing the role of semantics in the acquisition of noun and verb categories

Trading Spaces: Carving up Events for Learning Language

Can 9.5-month-old infants attribute to an agent a disposition to perform a particular action on objects?

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