Journal
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Volume 20, Issue 5, Pages 619-626Publisher
WILEY-BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, INC
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02341.x
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Funding
- NICHD NIH HHS [HD054448, R01 HD054448] Funding Source: Medline
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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.
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