Visual variability affects early verb learning

Research demonstrates that within‐category visual variability facilitates noun learning; however, the effect of visual variability on verb learning is unknown. We habituated 24‐month‐old children to a novel verb paired with an animated star‐shaped actor. Across multiple trials, children saw either a single action from an action category (identical actions condition, for example, travelling while repeatedly changing into a circle shape) or multiple actions from that action category (variable actions condition, for example, travelling while changing into a circle shape, then a square shape, then a triangle shape). Four test trials followed habituation. One paired the habituated verb with a new action from the habituated category (e.g., ‘dacking’ + pentagon shape) and one with a completely novel action (e.g., ‘dacking’ + leg movement). The others paired a new verb with a new same‐category action (e.g., ‘keefing’ + pentagon shape), or a completely novel category action (e.g., ‘keefing’ + leg movement). Although all children discriminated novel verb/action pairs, children in the identical actions condition discriminated trials that included the completely novel verb, while children in the variable actions condition discriminated the out‐of‐category action. These data suggest that – as in noun learning – visual variability affects verb learning and children's ability to form action categories.     

Children's identification of actors and patients in prototypical and nonprototypical sentence types

This research examined if children organize language categories around a prototype. Based on previous research with adults, the hypothesis held that the prototypical transitive sentence contains an animate actor and patient and a highly prototypical verb. The question of interest was if factors that contribute to adult judgments of sentence prototypicality (such as actor-patient animacy and verb prototypicality) affect young childrens' accuracy in correctly identifying sentence actors and patients. That is, are children more likely to make correct identifications in prototypical sentences? Sixty-four 2- and 4-year-old children were trained to to ntify sentence actors and patients in prototypical or nonprototypical sentences and then tested for generalization to sentences of other types. Two factors, verb prototypicality and animacy of sentence participants, combined to influence children's accuracy in actor/patient identification. Regardless of training condition, children produced more correct responses to sentences with animate actors than to sentences with inanimate actors. There was an interaction with verb prototypicality such that it was more typical for inanimate actors to act upon animate patients with what are otherwise low prototype verbs (e.g., low in action, low in intentionality). The results of the study are consistent with the view that similar cognitive mechanisms operate in language and in other nonlinguistic cognitive domains.     

Gesture for generalization: gesture facilitates flexible learning of words for actions on objects

Verb learning is difficult for children (Gentner, 1982 ), partially because children have a bias to associate a novel verb not only with the action it represents, but also with the object on which it is learned (Kersten & Smith, 2002 ). Here we investigate how well 4‐ and 5‐year‐old children (N = 48) generalize novel verbs for actions on objects after doing or seeing the action (e.g., twisting a knob on an object) or after doing or seeing a gesture for the action (e.g., twisting in the air near an object). We find not only that children generalize more effectively through gesture experience, but also that this ability to generalize persists after a 24‐hour delay.     

Infants Determine Others' Focus of Attention by Pragmatics and Exclusion

ABSTRACT

Children learning a verb may benefit from hearing it across situations . At the same time, in everyday contexts, situations in which a verb is heard will be interrupted by distracting events. Using Structural Alignment theory as a framework, Study 1 asks whether children can learn a verb when irrelevant, interleaved events are present. Two½- and 3½-year-old children saw dynamic events and were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions (differing in orders of events) or one of two control conditions. They extended the verbs in the experimental conditions, and not the control conditions. Three ½-year-olds were more successful than 2½-year-olds, though the younger children could extend verbs. A more difficult task is segmenting dynamic action into subevents that could be relevant for a verb (e.g., finding “chopping” in a cooking scene). In Study 2, 2½-, 3½-, and 4½-year-old children were assigned to experimental conditions in which relevant events flowed into irrelevant events (or vice versa) or to a control. Two½-year-olds failed to extend the verbs at test, differing from the older children; children in experimental conditions extended the verbs while children in the control condition did not. Altogether, these results show children can ignore irrelevant events (and subevents), and extend new verbs by 3½ years. Results are important to understand learning in everyday contexts in which verbs are heard in varied situations over time.     

Children extend both words and non‐verbal actions to novel exemplars

Markson and Bloom (1997) found that some learning processes involved in children's acquisition of a new word are also involved in their acquisition of a new fact. They argued that these findings provided evidence against a domain‐specific system for word learning. However, Waxman and Booth (2000) found that whereas children quite readily extend newly learned words to novel exemplars within a category, they do not do this with newly learned facts. They therefore argued that because children did not extend some facts in a principled way, word learning and fact learning may result from different domain‐specific processes. In the current study, we argue that facts are a poor comparison in this argument since facts vary in whether they are tied to particular individuals. A more appropriate comparison is a conventional non‐verbal action on an object –‘what we do with things like this’– since they are routinely generalized categorically to new objects. Our study shows that 2¹/₂‐year‐old children extend novel non‐verbal actions to new objects in the same way that they extend novel words to new objects. The findings provide support for the view that word learning represents a unique configuration of more general learning processes.     

Mandarin learners use syntactic bootstrapping in verb acquisition

Mandarin Chinese allows pervasive ellipsis of noun arguments (NPs) in discourse, which casts doubt concerning child learners' use of syntax in verb learning. This study investigated whether Mandarin learning children would nonetheless extend verb meanings based on the number of NPs in sentences. Forty-one Mandarin-speaking two- and three-year-olds enacted sentences with familiar motion verbs. The presence of an extra postverbal NP led the toddlers to extend causative meanings to intransitive verbs, and the absence of a postverbal NP led them to extend noncausative meanings to transitive verbs. The effects of adding or subtracting an NP were statistically indistinguishable. Thus, the number of NPs in a sentence appears to play a role in verb learning in Mandarin Chinese.     

Beyond fast mapping: young children's extensions of novel words and novel facts

L. Markson and P. Bloom (1997) concluded that there was evidence against a dedicated system for word learning on the basis of their finding that children remembered a novel word and a novel fact equally well. However, a word-learning system involves more than recognition memory; it must also provide a means to guide the extension of words to additional exemplars, and words and facts may differ with regard to extendibility. Two studies are reported in which 2-4-year-old children learned novel words and novel facts for unfamiliar objects and then were asked to extend the words and facts to additional exemplars of the training objects. In both studies, children extended the novel word to significantly more category members than they extended the novel fact. The results show that by 2 years of age, children honor the necessary extendibility of novel count nouns but are uncertain about the extendibility of arbitrary facts.     

Sound symbolism facilitates early verb learning

Some words are sound-symbolic in that they involve a non-arbitrary relationship between sound and meaning. Here, we report that 25-month-old children are sensitive to cross-linguistically valid sound-symbolic matches in the domain of action and that this sound symbolism facilitates verb learning in young children. We constructed a set of novel sound-symbolic verbs whose sounds were judged to match certain actions better than others, as confirmed by adult Japanese- as well as English speakers, and by 2- and 3-year-old Japanese-speaking children. These sound-symbolic verbs, together with other novel non-sound-symbolic verbs, were used in a verb learning task with 3-year-old Japanese children. In line with the previous literature, 3-year-olds could not generalize the meaning of novel non-sound-symbolic verbs on the basis of the sameness of action. However, 3-year-olds could correctly generalize the meaning of novel sound-symbolic verbs. These results suggest that iconic scaffolding by means of sound symbolism plays an important role in early verb learning.     

Matching- and nonmatching-to-sample concept learning in rats using olfactory stimuli

Previous research has shown that rats can learn matching-to-sample relations with olfactory stimuli; however, the specific characteristics of this relational control are unclear. In Experiment 1, 6 rats were trained to either match or nonmatch to sample in a modified operant chamber using common household spices as olfactory stimuli. After matching or nonmatching training with 10 exemplars, the contingencies were reversed with five new stimuli such that subjects trained on matching were shifted to nonmatching and vice versa. Following these reversed contingencies, the effects of the original training persisted for many trials with new exemplars. In Experiment 2, 9 rats were trained with matching procedures in an arena that provided for 18 different spatial locations for comparison stimuli. Five subjects were trained with differential reinforcement outcomes and 4 with only one type of reinforcer. Differential outcomes and multiple exemplars facilitated learning, and there was strong evidence for generalization to new stimuli for most rats that acquired several conditional discriminations. Performances with novel samples were generally above chance, but rarely reached the high levels obtained during baseline with well-trained stimulus relations. However, taken together, the data from the two experiments extend previous work, show that rats can learn both match and nonmatch relations with different experimental protocols, and demonstrate generalization to novel sample stimuli.     

Social-Psychological Origins of Feelings of Presence: Creating Social Presence With Machine-Generated Voices

Two experiments were conducted to test several questions regarding very young children's (6–24 months) learning (i.e., simple action imitation and word learning) from video. Specifically, this study tested the video deficit, which is the tendency for infants and toddlers to learn significantly more effectively from live information than they do when identical information is presented on a screen. First, the video deficit was explored using two different tasks. Overall, the pattern of results was similar for action imitation and word learning. Specifically, the video deficit was present for both simple action imitation and for word learning in the middle cohort, but not present for younger and older children. Second, there was some mitigation of the video deficit from seeing socially meaningful actors for action imitation; however for word learning the effect only approached significance. Third, repetition helped children learn words more effectively, especially for the youngest and oldest cohort; however, repetition did not help for simple task imitation.     

Learning to represent word meaning: What initial training events reveal about children's developing action verb concepts

Very little experimental research has shown how the events from which verbs are learned affect children's representation of meaning. This study addressed these lacunae by systematically exploring how three different initial training contexts affect children's and adults' interpretation of novel action verbs. Brief, videotaped action events were used to teach children and adults novel verbs in 1 of 3 conditions. Subjects were asked whether these verbs generalized to other events differing only in outcome, manner, instrument, or agent. Initial representation of verb meaning was inferred from generalizations. Unlike 10-year-olds and adults, 3-year-olds' interpretations were (a) significantly context specific—preferring instrument and outcome elements of meaning in one context, but manner in another, and (b) consistently, though moderately biased to favor the manner of action. Results clearly demonstrate that both the young word learner and the context in which word learning occurs are equally important determinants of developing action verb concepts.     

Young children's selective learning of rule games from reliable and unreliable models

We investigated preschoolers’ selective learning from models that had previously appeared to be reliable or unreliable. Replicating previous research, children from 4 years selectively learned novel words from reliable over unreliable speakers. Extending previous research, children also selectively learned other kinds of acts – novel games – from reliable actors. More important, – and novel to this study, this selective learning was not just based on a preference for one model or one kind of act, but had a normative dimension to it. Children understood the way a reliable actor demonstrated an act not only as the better one, but as the normatively appropriate or correct one, as indicated in both their explicit verbal comments and their spontaneous normative interventions (e.g., protest, critique) in response to third-party acts deviating from the one demonstrated. These findings are discussed in the broader context of the development of children's social cognition and cultural learning.     

Young children can extend motion verbs to point-light displays

In the first study using point-light displays (lights corresponding to the joints of the human body) to examine children's understanding of verbs, 3-year-olds were tested to see if they could perceive familiar actions that corresponded to motion verbs (e.g., walking). Experiment 1 showed that children could extend familiar motion verbs (e.g., walking and dancing) to videotaped point-light actions shown in the intermodal preferential looking paradigm. Children watched the action that matched the requested verb significantly more than they watched the action that did not match the verb. In Experiment 2, the findings of Experiment 1 were validated by having children spontaneously produce verbs for these actions. The use of point-light displays may illuminate the factors that contribute to verb learning.     

"Really? She Blicked the Baby?": Two-Year-Olds Learn Combinatorial Facts About Verbs by Listening

ABSTRACT— 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.     

2.5-year-olds use cross-situational consistency to learn verbs under referential uncertainty

Recent evidence shows that children can use cross-situational statistics to learn new object labels under referential ambiguity (e.g., Smith & Yu, 2008). Such evidence has been interpreted as support for proposals that statistical information about word-referent co-occurrence plays a powerful role in word learning. But object labels represent only a fraction of the vocabulary children acquire, and arguably represent the simplest case of word learning based on observations of world scenes. Here we extended the study of cross-situational word learning to a new segment of the vocabulary, action verbs, to permit a stronger test of the role of statistical information in word learning. In two experiments, on each trial 2.5-year-olds encountered two novel intransitive (e.g., "She's pimming!"; Experiment 1) or transitive verbs (e.g., "She's pimming her toy!"; Experiment 2) while viewing two action events. The consistency with which each verb accompanied each action provided the only source of information about the intended referent of each verb. The 2.5-year-olds used cross-situational consistency in verb learning, but also showed significant limits on their ability to do so as the sentences and scenes became slightly more complex. These findings help to define the role of cross-situational observation in word learning.     

The role of preschoolers' social understanding in evaluating the informativeness of causal interventions

Preschoolers use information from interventions, namely intentional actions, to make causal inferences. We asked whether children consider some interventions to be more informative than others based on two components of an actor’s knowledge state: whether an actor possesses causal knowledge, and whether an actor is allowed to use their knowledge in a given situation. Three- and four-year-olds saw a novel toy that activated in the presence of certain objects. Two actors, one knowledgeable about the toy and one ignorant, each tried to activate the toy with an object. In Experiment 1, either the actors chose objects or the child chose for them. In Experiment 2, the actors chose objects blindfolded. Objects were always placed on the toy simultaneously, and thus were equally associated with the effect. Preschoolers’ causal inferences favored the knowledgeable actor’s object only when he was allowed to choose it (Experiment 1). Thus, children consider both personal and situational constraints on knowledge when evaluating the informativeness of causal interventions.     

The distributed learning effect for children's acquisition of an abstract syntactic construction

In many cognitive domains, learning is more effective when exemplars are distributed over a number of sessions than when they are all presented within one session. The present study investigated this distributed learning effect with respect to English-speaking children's acquisition of a complex grammatical construction. Forty-eight children aged 3;6–5;10 (Experiment 1) and 72 children aged 4;0–5;0 (Experiment 2) were given 10 exposures to the construction all in one session (massed), or on a schedule of two trials per day for 5 days (distributed-pairs), or one trial per day for 10 days (distributed). Children in both the distributed-pairs and distributed conditions learnt the construction better than children in the massed condition, as evidenced by productive use of this construction with a verb that had not been presented during training. Methodological and theoretical implications of this finding are discussed, with particular reference to single-process accounts of language acquisition.     

Parallels Between Action‐Object Mapping and Word‐Object Mapping in Young Children

Across a series of four experiments with 3‐ to 4‐year‐olds we demonstrate how cognitive mechanisms supporting noun learning extend to the mapping of actions to objects. In Experiment 1 (n = 61) the demonstration of a novel action led children to select a novel, rather than a familiar object. In Experiment 2 (n = 78) children exhibited long‐term retention of novel action‐object mappings and extended these actions to other category members. In Experiment 3 (n = 60) we showed that children formed an accurate sensorimotor record of the novel action. In Experiment 4 (n = 54) we demonstrate limits on the types of actions mapped to novel objects. Overall these data suggest that certain aspects of noun mapping share common processing with action mapping and support a domain‐general account of word learning.     

The internal structure of English transitive sentences

A major question in psychology is whether the same mechanisms are required for language learning and processing as for other cognitive tasks. A substantial body of literature has shown that natural categories are organized around a prototype, with other category members resembling the prototype to a greater or lesser amount based on the degree of shared properties. In order to investigate whether the prototype notion could be extended to linguistic phenomena, adult students (N=148) rated 512 sentences on a 7-point scale as to their goodness of fit to the categoryEnglish transitive sentence. Sentences differed in the animacy fo their actors and patients, the noun pairs used as actor/patient exemplars, and the hypothesized prototypicality of their verbs. Each of the identified factors showed the spread in ranking across different exemplars that is typical of other natural categories, but the factors interacted with each in complex ways to determine the overall ranking of the sentence. Not all sentences were equally representative of the categoryEnglish transitive sentence. In general, sentences with animate actors, high-prototypicality verbs, and animate patients were the most prototypical, followed closely by sentences with animate actors high-prototypicality verbs, and inanimate patients. Results were consistent with the suggestion that language and other types of cognitive tasks require the same basic processes and structures.     

Feelings of familiarity and false memory for specific associations resulting from mugshot exposure

This research reveals that mugshot viewing accompanied by questions about an action can cause young adults to associate the pictured person and the queried action, leading to later false recollection of having seen that person perform that action. In contrast, mugshot viewing in older adults can lead to vague feelings of familiarity for the pictured person, encouraging older adults to later falsely recognize the pictured person performing any familiar action. Participants viewed events involving actors performing different actions and then were asked verbal questions about which actor had performed each action, with each question accompanied by mugshots of potential “perpetrators” of the action. In a later recognition test, older adults were more likely to falsely recognize a novel conjunction of a familiar actor and action if they had seen a mugshot of that actor, regardless of whether the mugshot had accompanied a question about that action. In contrast, young adults were more likely to falsely recognize a conjunction event only if it involved an actor whose mugshot had accompanied a question about that particular action. This effect remained when the analysis was limited to trials involving actors whose mugshots had not been previously selected, implicating false recollection rather than commitment effects.