"Really? She blicked the baby?": two-year-olds learn combinatorial facts about verbs by listening.
Children use syntax to guide verb learning. We asked whether the syntactic structure in which a novel verb occurs is meaningful to children even without a concurrent scene from which to infer the verb's semantic content. In two experiments, 2-year-olds observed dialogues in which interlocutors used a new verb in transitive ("Jane blicked the baby!") or intransitive ("Jane blicked!") sentences. The children later heard the verb in isolation ("Find blicking!") while watching a one-participant event and a two-participant event presented side by side. Children who had heard transitive dialogues looked reliably longer at the two-participant event than did those who had heard intransitive dialogues. This effect persisted even when children were tested on a different day, but disappeared when no novel verb accompanied the test events (Experiment 2). Thus, 2-year-olds gather useful combinatorial information about a novel verb simply from hearing it in sentences, and later retrieve that information to guide interpretation of the verb.
Yuan
Sylvia
S
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL 61820, USA. shyuan@cyrus.psych.uiuc.edu
Fisher
Cynthia
C
D001288:Attention; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D012660:Semantics; D013067:Speech Perception; D014825:Vocabulary