title: Mapping novel nouns and verbs onto dynamic action events: are verb meanings easier to learn than noun meanings for Japanese children?
abstract: The present research examined how 3- and 5-year-old Japanese children map novel nouns and verbs onto dynamic action events and generalize them to new instances. Studies 1 to 3 demonstrated that although both 3- and 5-year-olds were able to map novel nouns onto novel objects, only 5-year-olds could generalize verbs solely on the basis of the sameness of the action. Study 4 showed that the difficulty young children experience in learning verbs lies mainly in mapping the appropriate element to a verb rather than in encoding and remembering an action itself. The results of this research are related to a long-debated issue of whether noun learning is privileged over verb learning.
authors.affiliation: Department of Environmental Information, Keio University at Shonan-Fujisawa, Fujisawa, Kanagawa, Japan. imai@sfc.keio.ac.jp
authors.forename: Mutsumi
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Imai
authors.forename: Etsuko
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Haryu
authors.forename: Hiroyuki
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Okada
mesh_terms: D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007564:Japan; D007802:Language; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics; D014743:Videotape Recording; D014825:Vocabulary