Infants use known verbs to learn novel nouns: evidence from 15- and 19-month-olds.
Fluent speakers' representations of verbs include semantic knowledge about the nouns that can serve as their arguments. These "selectional restrictions" of a verb can in principle be recruited to learn the meaning of a novel noun. For example, the sentence He ate the carambola licenses the inference that carambola refers to something edible. We ask whether 15- and 19-month-old infants can recruit their nascent verb lexicon to identify the referents of novel nouns that appear as the verbs' subjects. We compared infants' interpretation of a novel noun (e.g., the dax) in two conditions: one in which dax is presented as the subject of animate-selecting construction (e.g., The dax is crying), and the other in which dax is the subject of an animacy-neutral construction (e.g., The dax is right here). Results indicate that by 19months, infants use their representations of known verbs to inform the meaning of a novel noun that appears as its argument.
Northwestern University, Department of Psychology, USA. Electronic address: brock@u.northwestern.edu.
Brock
B
Ferguson
University of Chicago Medicine, Department of Surgery, Division of Otolaryngology, USA. Electronic address: eileengraf@uchicago.edu.
Eileen
E
Graf
Northwestern University, Department of Psychology, USA. Electronic address: s-waxman@northwestern.edu.
Sandra R
SR
Waxman
D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007804:Language Development; D007858:Learning; D014825:Vocabulary
Infants; Language development; Nouns; Selectional restrictions; Verbs; Word learning