Studying the Real-Time Interpretation of Novel Noun and Verb Meanings in Young Children

Abstract

Decades of research show that children rely on the linguistic context in which novel words occur to infer their meanings. However, because learning in these studies was assessed after children had heard numerous occurrences of a novel word in informative linguistic contexts, it is impossible to determine how much exposure would be needed for a child to learn from such information. This study investigated the speed with which French 20-month-olds and 3-to-4-year-olds exploit function words to determine the syntactic category of novel words and therefore infer their meanings. In a real-time preferential looking task, participants saw two videos side-by-side on a TV-screen: one showing a person performing a novel action, and the other a person passively holding a novel object. At the same time, participants heard only three occurrences of a novel word preceded either by a determiner (e.g., “Regarde! Une dase! – “Look! A dase!”) or a pronoun (e.g., “Regarde! Elle dase!” – “Look! She’s dasing!”). 3-to-4-year-olds exploited function words to categorize novel words and infer their meanings: they looked more to the novel action in the verb condition, while participants in the noun condition looked more to the novel object. 20-month-olds, however, did not show this difference. We discuss possible reasons for why 20-month-olds may have found it difficult to infer novel word meanings in our task. Given that 20-month-olds can use function words to learn word meanings in experiments providing many repetitions, we suspect that more repetitions might be needed to observe positive effects of learning in this age range in our task. Our study establishes nevertheless that before age 4, young children become able to exploit function words to infer the meanings of unknown words as soon as they occur. This ability to interpret speech in real-time and build interpretations about novel word meanings might be extremely useful for young children to map words to their possible referents and to boost their acquisition of word meanings.

“The tiger is hitting! the duck too!” 3-year-olds can use prosodic information to constrain their interpretation of ellipsis

“…While Dautriche et al's test videos involved one or two characters, and de Carvalho et al's stimuli consisted of simple still images to illustrate the noun or verb meaning of an ambiguous word, in our experiment each video presented three characters. Identifying the meaning of our test sentences while watching two complex videos side-by-side on the screen might have been more difficult for young children than inspecting simpler videos or still images in previous studies (an observation that is consistent with the recent findings of de Carvalho, Babineau, Trueswell, Waxman, & Christophe, 2019;and Valleau, Konishi, Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, & Arunachalam, 2018). As we explained above, we had to use more complex videos in our experiment and to include three characters per video due to pragmatic reasons.…”

Syntactic prediction adaptation accounts for language processing and language learning

“…The same kind of analysis was used in other eye-tracking studies using a similar preferential-looking paradigm with infants and preschoolers (e.g. de Carvalho, Babineau, Trueswell, Waxman, & Christophe, 2019, de Carvalho et al, 2017Von Holzen & Mani, 2012; see Maris & Oostenveld, 2007 for a formal presentation of the analysis itself).…”

Familiar words can serve as a semantic seed for syntactic bootstrapping

“…Hence, a total of 12 children were excluded from the eye‐tracking analyses, resulting in 48 children remaining for those analyses. The preregistered number of participants sufficient for the eye‐tracking analyses was based on de Carvalho, Babineau, et al (2019), which found a medium‐size effect with a final sample of 48 children. Note that in our study, pointing responses were kept for subjects with low‐quality/corrupted eye‐tracking data.…”

“…In the second part of the experiment (i.e., the test phase), participants were tested with two videos displayed side‐by‐side on a TV‐screen as follows: one video showing an agent performing an intransitive action, and the other video showing an agent passively holding an object (the same videos used in de Carvalho, Babineau, et al, 2019, but with new sound tracks recorded by the last author). A total of six trials were presented to each participant: two practice trials followed by four test trials.…”

“…The goal was to assess whether children can use their ability to compute distributional regularities to track the co‐occurrence of this new function word with a specific type of familiar words (either nouns or verbs, in a between‐participants design), and then use this information when encountering novel words co‐occurring with the newly learned function word. To test this, we relied on an experimental design recently developed by de Carvalho, Babineau, Trueswell, Waxman, and Christophe (2019), who showed that 3‐ to 4‐year‐olds can use known function words in real‐time to predict the syntactic category of novel content words. In this task participants saw two videos side‐by‐side on a TV‐screen – one showing a person performing a novel action, and the other a person passively holding a novel object.…”