TY - JOUR
T1 - Infants use known verbs to learn novel nouns
T2 - Evidence from 15- and 19-month-olds
AU - Ferguson, Brock
AU - Graf, Eileen
AU - Waxman, Sandra R.
N1 - Funding Information:
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.
Copyright:
Copyright 2014 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2014/4
Y1 - 2014/4
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Infants
KW - Language development
KW - Nouns
KW - Selectional restrictions
KW - Verbs
KW - Word learning
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.12.014
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.12.014
M3 - Article
C2 - 24463934
AN - SCOPUS:84892886916
SN - 0010-0277
VL - 131
SP - 139
EP - 146
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
IS - 1
ER -