The Origins of Verb Learning: Preverbal and Postverbal Infants' Learning of Word–Action Relations

Abstract

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.5592637.

Bilingual versus monolingual infants’ novel word-action mapping before and after first-word production: Influence of developing noun-dominance on perceptual narrowing

“…Although these experimental studies provide insights into bilingual versus monolingual infants’ phonetic perception, lexical mapping and noun learning after first word onset, none compare bilinguals’ versus monolinguals’ emerging verb-action mapping prior to and after the transition to first words (see review, DeAnda, Poulin-Dubois, Zesiger & Friend, 2016). During lexical mapping development, a precursor to lexical comprehension, recent evidence suggests that monolingual postverbal infants (referring in that study to post verb comprehension onset) of 12- to 14 months tune into language-specific lexical properties, such as the greater frequency of nouns relative to verbs in their noun-friendly language ( noun bias , e.g., English; Gogate & Maganti, 2017). As these infants naturally learned more words, in particular, nouns in the noun-friendly language (e.g., English) as per maternal report on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MCDI, Fenson, Dale, Reznick, Bates, Thal & Pethick, 1994), their verb-action mapping in the laboratory was attenuated relative to infants who had not learned as many nouns.…”

“…Thus, tuning into a noun bias and learning more novel noun-object relations results in a temporary perceptual-lexical narrowing to nouns which, in turn, temporarily attenuates word-action mapping in postverbal relative to preverbal infants: the perceptual-lexical narrowing hypothesis (Gogate & Hollich, 2016; Gogate & Maganti, 2017). Substantiating this hypothesis, the postverbal 12- to 14-month-old infants failed to learn two novel word-action mappings when exposed to the pairings during habituation, whereas the preverbal 8- to 9-month-old infants succeeded in learning these mappings (Gogate & Maganti, 2017). Early heightened perception of word-action relations likely emerges from young infants’ perception of their own and others’ actions (e.g., 2 months; Bahrick & Watson, 1985) that far surpasses their object and face perception when pitted against one another (e.g., 5.5 months; Bahrick, Gogate & Ruiz, 2002).…”

Motion tracking of parents’ infant‐ versus adult‐directed actions reveals general and action‐specific modulations

“…Far from being an isolated modality only relevant for language learning, though, emerging evidence suggests that linguistic modulations, like enhanced social‐emotional and eye gaze cues, co‐occur with motion modulations (Nagai & Rohlfing, ; Rohlfing et al, ; )and together optimize action learning conditions (Brand & Tapscott, ; ). Complementarily, extensive evidence exists for the opposite effect, namely that motions of parents and infants can facilitate language learning (Chang, de Barbaro, & Deák, ; Gogate, Bolzani, & Betancourt, ; Gogate & Maganti, ; Gogate, Maganti, & Laing, ; Matatyaho & Gogate, ; Matatyaho‐Bullaro et al, ; Nomikou, Koke, & Rohlfing, ; Rader & Zukow‐Goldring, ; Yoshida & Burling, ). Consequently, for the teaching potential of parental modulations to be fully understood, future research must consider the entire repertoire of infant‐directed behaviours.…”

The Use of Pitch Accent in Word–Object Association by Monolingual Japanese Infants

“…For example, we used fixed‐time trials during the habituation phase in order to make the experiment analogous to past studies using a minimal consonantal contrast (e.g., Fennell & Waxman, ; Werker et al., ). However, some recent studies also employ infant‐controlled trials (e.g., see Gogate & Maganti, ; Hay et al., ; Singh et al., , ) in which the trial terminates if infants look away from the display for a certain amount of time (usually 1 or 2 sec). Although we are not aware of any studies which directly suggest that fixed‐time trials and infant‐controlled trials in the habituation phase yield different looking behaviors in the test phase (but see Gogate & Maganti, for a detailed review of the dynamics of infant attention shift), it is possible that this methodological difference may contribute to the result we obtained in this study.…”

“…Infants start to learn word and referent associations as early as 6–8 months (e.g., Tincoff & Jusczyk, ) and produce words by the end of their first year. A wide range of studies has suggested that word‐referent learning is influenced by multiple factors such as the learner's current level of vocabulary development (Werker, Fennell, Corcoran, & Stager, ) and language background (Burnham et al., ; Fennell, Byers‐Heinlein, & Werker, ; Singh, ; Singh et al., , ), the familiarity of the word being learned (Fennell & Werker, ), and the presence or absence of synchrony between word presentation and object motion during the task (Gogate, ; see also Gogate & Maganti, ; He & Lidz, for verb‐action learning). Phonetic properties are also known to be influential in word‐referent, especially word–object, learning.…”