Twenty four-month-old infants' interpretations of novel verbs and nouns in dynamic scenes. Waxman, S. R, Lidz, J. L, Braun, I. E, & Lavin, T. Cogn Psychol, 59(1):67-95, 2009. doi abstract bibtex 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). We document that 24-month-olds' representations of novel words are sufficiently precise to permit them to map novel verbs to event categories (e.g., waving events) and novel nouns to object categories (e.g., balloons). We also document the time-course underlying infants' mapping of the novel words. These results beckon us to move beyond asking whether or not infants can represent verb meanings, and to consider instead the conditions that support successful verb learning in infants and young children.
@Article{Waxman2009,
author = {Sandra R Waxman and Jeffrey L Lidz and Irena E Braun and Tracy Lavin},
journal = {Cogn Psychol},
title = {Twenty four-month-old infants' interpretations of novel verbs and nouns in dynamic scenes.},
year = {2009},
number = {1},
pages = {67-95},
volume = {59},
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). We document that 24-month-olds'
representations of novel words are sufficiently precise to permit
them to map novel verbs to event categories (e.g., waving events)
and novel nouns to object categories (e.g., balloons). We also document
the time-course underlying infants' mapping of the novel words. These
results beckon us to move beyond asking whether or not infants can
represent verb meanings, and to consider instead the conditions that
support successful verb learning in infants and young children.},
doi = {10.1016/j.cogpsych.2009.02.001},
keywords = {Attention, Child, Concept Formation, Discrimination (Psychology), Female, Humans, Infant, Language Development, Learning, Male, Preschool, Psycholinguistics, Reaction Time, Research Design, Speech Perception, 19303591},
}
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They begin to reconcile what, until now, has been a large\n\tand largely unexplained gap between infants' well-documented ability\n\tto acquire verbs in the natural course of their lives and their rather\n\tsurprising failures to do so in many laboratory-based tasks. We presented\n\t24-month-old infants with dynamic scenes (e.g., a man waving a balloon),\n\tand asked (a) whether infants could construe these scenes flexibly,\n\tnoticing the consistent action (e.g., waving) as well as the consistent\n\tobject (e.g., the balloon) and (b) whether their construals of the\n\tscenes were influenced by the grammatical form of a novel word used\n\tto describe them (verb or noun). We document that 24-month-olds'\n\trepresentations of novel words are sufficiently precise to permit\n\tthem to map novel verbs to event categories (e.g., waving events)\n\tand novel nouns to object categories (e.g., balloons). We also document\n\tthe time-course underlying infants' mapping of the novel words. 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