Twenty four-month-old infants’ interpretations of novel verbs and nouns in dynamic scenes

Abstract

The current experiments address several concerns, both empirical and theoretical in nature, that have surfaced within the verb-learning literature. They begin to reconcile what, until now, has been a large and largely unexplained gap between infants’ well-documented ability to acquire verbs in the natural course of their lives and their rather surprising failures to do so in many laboratory-based tasks. We presented 24-month-old infants with dynamic scenes (e.g., a man waving a balloon), and asked a) whether infants could construe these scenes flexibly, noticing the consistent action (e.g., waving) as well as the consistent object (e.g., the balloon) and b) whether their construals of the scenes were influenced by the grammatical form of a novel word used to describe them (verb or noun). Infants successfully mapped novel verbs to event categories (e.g., waving events) and novel nouns to object categories (e.g., balloons). Moreover, infants’ representations were sufficiently abstract to permit them to extend novel verbs and nouns appropriately beyond the precise scenes on which they had been taught.

Generalizing beyond the input: The functions of the constructions matter

“…While certain domain-specific ''substantive'' biases have been proposed (e.g., Culbertson et al, 2012; but see Goldberg, 2013), other biases have been argued to emerge from the communicative function of language (Hawkins, 1994(Hawkins, , 2004(Hawkins, , 2014Jaeger, 2010;Levy & Jaeger, 2007;Mahowald, Fedorenko, Piantadosi, & Gibson, 2013;Piantadosi, Tily, & Gibson, 2012), from domain general constraints on working memory (Fedorenko, Gibson, & Rohde, 2006;Gathercole & Baddeley, 1993;Hudson Kam & Newport, 2005), for a preference for simplicity (Culbertson & Newport, 2015), or from rational inductive processes (Griffiths, Chater, Kemp, Perfors, & Tenenbaum, 2010;Perfors, Tenenbaum, & Wonnacott, 2010). It is also well-established that the meanings of words play a role in constraining their distributions and vice versa, insofar as semantically related words tend to occur in similar distributional contexts (Arunachalam & Waxman, 2015;Fisher, Gleitman, & Gleitman, 1991;Scott & Fisher, 2009;Waxman, Lidz, Braun, & Lavin, 2009). Somewhat less emphasized have been constraints that emerge from the function of particular constructions (but see e.g., Ambridge & Goldberg, 2008;Ambridge, Pine, Rowland, & Young, 2008;Bybee, 1985;Lakoff, 1987;Langacker, 1987).…”

Phrasal prosody constrains word segmentation in French 16-month-olds

“…In addition, infants in their second year of life already form categories of function words (e.g. articles that go with nouns, pronouns that go with verbs, see Höhle, Weissenborn, Kiefer, Schulz, & Schmitz, 2004;Kedar, Casasola, & Lust, 2006;Shi & Melançon, in press;Zangl & Fernald, 2007), and are even able to exploit these in order to infer the probable meaning of an accompanying content word (noun vs. verb, Bernal, Lidz, Millotte, & Christophe, 2007;Waxman, Lidz, Braun, & Lavin, 2009).…”

Finding meaning in a noisy world: exploring the effects of referential ambiguity and competition on 2·5-year-olds’ cross-situational word learning

“…assume it refers to an object, whereas those who hear the same word used as a verb (e.g., The man is larping a balloon.) assume it refers to an action (e.g., Bernal et al, 2007;Waxman et al, 2009). …”

“…For instance, children can use distributional, phonological, and syntactic information to identify a word's likely grammatical category (e.g., Cauvet, Limissuri, Millotte, Skoruppa, Cabrol, & Christophe, 2014;Mintz, 2006;Zhang, Shi, & Li, 2015) and restrict reference accordingly (e.g., Bernal, Lidz, Millotte, & Christophe, 2007;Fisher, Klingler, & Song, 2006;Waxman & Booth, 2001;Waxman, Lidz, Braun, & Lavin, 2009). Thus, 24-month-olds who hear a novel word used as a noun (e.g., The man is waving a larp.)…”