Early Verb Learning: How Do Children Learn How to Compare Events?

Abstract

An important problem verb learners must solve is how to extend verbs. Children could use cross-situational information to guide their extensions, however comparing events is difficult. Two studies test whether children benefit from initially seeing a pair of similar events (‘progressive alignment’) while learning new verbs, and whether this influence changes with age. In Study 1, 2 ½- and 3 ½-year-old children participated in an interactive task. Children who saw a pair of similar events and then varied events were able to extend verbs at test, differing from a control group; children who saw two pairs of varied events did not differ from the control group. In Study 2, events were presented on a monitor. Following the initial pair of events that varied by condition, a Tobii x120 eye tracker recorded 2 ½-, 3 ½- and 4 ½-year-olds’ fixations to specific elements of events (AOIs) during the second pair of events, which were the same across conditions. After seeing the pair of events that were highly similar, 2 ½-year-olds showed significantly longer fixation durations to agents and to affected objects as compared to the all varied condition. At test, 3 ½-year-olds were able to extend the verb, but only in the progressive alignment condition. These results are important because they show children’s visual attention to relevant elements in dynamic events is influenced by their prior comparison experience, and they show that young children benefit from seeing similar events as they learn to compare events to each other.

Structure Mapping for Social Learning

“…Parents asked how to best teach their children novel adjectives (“blickish”) spontaneously use contrasting alignable exemplars (a striped cup vs. a dotted cup, where “blickish” refers to stripes) rather than less alignable contrasts (a stripy cup vs. a dotted pencil) (Manders & Hall, ). These findings accord with the well‐tested usefulness of similarity and comparison in children's learning of verbs (Childers et al, ; Maguire, Hirsh‐Pasek, Golinkoff, & Brandone, ) and spatial concepts (Casasola, ; Gattis, ; Loewenstein & Gentner, ).…”

“…Learners who hear two or more events called by the same label are naturally prompted to compare them, which highlights their relational commonalities. For example, children hearing two action events labeled by the same verb may learn the relational commonality (the verb meaning) despite seeing different agents and recipients across the events (Childers & Paik, ; Childers et al., ; Pruden, Hirsh‐Pasek, Shallcross, & Golinkoff, ). This mechanism—that a common label invites comparison—is distinct from another role of language in relational learning, whereby known relational labels make specific relational concepts more salient (see Gentner & Christie, ; Gentner & Namy, , for a full explication of this relational label mechanism).…”

Grammatical Constructions as Relational Categories

“…Fittingly, there is now substantial evidence that structural alignment is critical in verb generalization. Childers and colleagues (e.g., Childers et al., ) have shown that aligning events described by a novel verb helps young children generalize the verb to events with novel objects, and Haryu, Imai, and Okada () show that initial extension of verbs to events with highly similar objects better allows the verb to then be extended further to events with more disparate objects, consistent with the progressive alignment pattern.…”

Gesture for generalization: gesture facilitates flexible learning of words for actions on objects

“…On both days of testing, we found that children who received gesture training were better able to generalize what they had learned than children who received action training. Interestingly, the previous literature has suggested that learning a word with respect to only one exemplar can restrict a child's ability to generalize the word; exposing children to multiple exemplars, particularly if they are perceptually similar to each other, can help support generalization in word learning (Childers et al., , ; Haryu, Imai, & Okada, ). Our findings indicate that gesture can also promote generalization in verb learning, using a route that does not involve multiple exemplars.…”