title: Early verb learning in 20-month-old Japanese-speaking children.
abstract: The present study investigated whether children's representations of morphosyntactic information are abstract enough to guide early verb learning. Using an infant-controlled habituation paradigm with a switch design, Japanese-speaking children aged 1 ; 8 were habituated to two different events in which an object was engaging in an action. Each event was paired with a novel word embedded in a single intransitive verb sentence frame. The results indicated that only 40% of the children were able to map a novel verb onto the action when the mapping task was complex. However, by simplifying the mapping task, 88% of the children succeeded in verb-action mapping. There were no differences in perceptual salience between the agent and action switches in the task. These results provide strong evidence that Japanese-speaking children aged 1 ; 8 are able to use an intransitive verb sentence frame to guide early verb learning unless the mapping task consumes too much of their cognitive resources.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, McGill University.
authors.forename: Yuriko
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Oshima-Takane
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, McGill University.
authors.forename: Junko
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Ariyama
authors.affiliation: NTT Communication Science Labs, NTT Corporation.
authors.forename: Tessei
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Kobayashi
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Concordia University.
authors.forename: Marina
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Katerelos
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Concordia University.
authors.forename: Diane
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Poulin-Dubois
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006185:Habituation, Psychophysiologic; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007564:Japan; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D009039:Motion Perception; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D012660:Semantics; D014706:Verbal Learning