Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 131, Issue 1, April 2014, Pages 139-146
Cognition

Brief article
Infants use known verbs to learn novel nouns: Evidence from 15- and 19-month-olds

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2013.12.014Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We designed a new eyetracking task to study word learning at 19- and 15-months.

  • Can infants use known verbs to identify referents of novel nouns?

  • 19-month-olds successfully used familiar verbs as cues when learning novel nouns.

  • 15-month-olds failed to use familiar verbs as cues when learning novel nouns.

  • Infants’ eye movements show that this task requires significant cognitive effort.

Abstract

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 19 months, infants use their representations of known verbs to inform the meaning of a novel noun that appears as its argument.

Introduction

Upon hearing the sentence He ate the carambola, fluent speakers of English would infer that carambola refers to something edible. And upon hearing the sentence He ate his piano, they would assume either that the sentence is nonsense or that an unconventional eating metaphor has been invoked. These inferences are guided by the verb eating’s “selectional restrictions” – the semantic requirements that this verb places on its arguments (Chomsky, 1965; Jackendoff, 1990; Katz and Fodor, 1963, Pinker, 1989, Resnik, 1996). In this paper, we ask whether infants can use their knowledge of verbs’ selectional restrictions to inform the meaning of a novel noun that appears as its argument.

Although infants occasionally violate selectional restrictions in their spontaneous productions (Bowerman, 1978, Bowerman, 1982), they nonetheless appreciate the selectional restrictions of at least some verbs by their second birthday (Friedrich and Friederici, 2005, Naigles et al., 2009, Valian et al., 2006). For example, when 26- and 30-month-olds are presented with two images (e.g., a cookie and a book), they are faster to fixate on the cookie when they hear a sentence such as Eat the cookie than Take the cookie (Fernald et al., 2008, Mani and Huettig, 2012). By this age, they can also use known verbs to identify the referents of otherwise ambiguous pronouns (e.g., Which one can you drive?) and can rapidly acquire the selectional restrictions of a novel verb from the contexts in which it occurs (Yuan, Fisher, Kandhadai, & Fernald, 2011). Together, these accomplishments reveal that infants successfully use the selectional restrictions of known verbs in sentence processing.

What is less clear is whether infants can use a known verb’s selectional restrictions to hone in on the meaning of a novel noun that appears as its argument. Only one study has addressed this directly, and its results are promising. Goodman, McDonough, and Brown (2008) introduced infants to a novel noun alongside a known verb (e.g., Mommy feeds the ferret). Next, they presented infants with images of four objects (e.g., one animal and three artefacts) and said, for example, Show me the ferret. Infants at 24 and 30 months successfully recruited the verbs’ selectional restrictions, selecting the animate object as the referent of the novel noun. Despite some methodological limitations (e.g., using familiar English words, presenting an “oddball” animate target amongst 3 inanimate distractors), these data suggest that 2-year-olds may indeed use the selectional restrictions of a known verb to infer the meaning of a novel noun.

In the present study, we ask whether a known verb can inform infants of the animacy status of its subject. To address this, we compare infants’ interpretation of a novel noun (e.g., dax) in an Informative condition, where dax was presented as the subject of an animate-selecting verb (e.g., The dax is crying) to their interpretation in a Neutral condition, where dax was presented in an animacy-neutral construction (e.g., The dax is right here). We designed a new eyetracking paradigm that permits us to advance previous work in several ways. First, it permits us to consider the capacities of younger infants (15- and 19-month-olds) who, by all estimates, have only a modest stock of verbs. Second, it permits us to ask whether infants’ linguistic representations of these verbs are robust enough to guide their selection of a referent for a novel noun that appears later as its argument. Inspired by recent designs (e.g., Arunachalam and Waxman, 2010, Yuan and Fisher, 2009), we introduce known verbs in the absence of any candidate referents for the novel noun. Third, we control for infants’ existing word knowledge by presenting nonce words, and minimize demand characteristics by offering only two candidate referents at test (cf., Goodman et al., 2008).

Section snippets

Participants

Fifty-nine infants were included in the final sample, 30 19-month-olds (M = 19.62 months, ranging 18.0–21.85; 16 F) and 29 15-month-olds (M = 15.60 months, ranging 14.20–17.82; 12 F). They were recruited from the greater Evanston, IL area and acquiring English as their first language, with no more than 25% exposure to another language. Caregivers completed the MacArthur Short Form Vocabulary Checklist: Level II (Form A) (Fenson et al., 1993) as well as a supplementary checklist that asked which of

Data preparation

We focused our analysis on the window beginning at the onset of the target word at test and lasting through the end of the trial (5.5s total). For each trial, an 811px by 713px area of interest (AOI) was defined around each of the object images. Gazes outside these areas were excluded from analysis, as were trials in which an infant’s total looking time was significantly lower (2+ SD) than their age group’s mean. Infants in both age groups contributed an average of at least 5.5 trials in both

Results

As predicted, on familiar trials, infants’ overall preference for the animal (M19-months = .60, M15-months = .63) was moderated by the target words they heard (see Fig. 2). At 19 months, infants looked significantly more towards the animal when prompted with its name (M = .79, SD = .11) than with the name of the artefact (M = .42, SD = .16), β = .45, SE = .04, χ2(1) = 20.11, p < .001. The same was true at 15 months (animal named: M = .77, SD = .11; artefact named: M = .49; SD = .18), β = .33, SE = .07, χ2(1) = 10.38, p = .001,

Discussion

By 19 months, infants successfully recruit their modest verb knowledge to identify the referents of novel nouns that appear as their subjects. Remarkably, 19-month-old infants’ representation of the verb itself – without any cues from the visual scene – is sufficiently robust to be recruited downstream to guide their identification of a referent of a novel noun. This capacity is not yet evident in younger infants. Although 15-month-olds understood most of the verbs we introduced and successfully

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship awarded to B.F. and a National Science Foundation grant (BCS-1023300) to S.R.W. We thank Casey Lew-Williams for his comments on an earlier version of the manuscript, as well as Kristin Lewis, Mesum Mathison, and Jermaine Dictado for their assistance collecting data.

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