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.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 139-146 |
Number of pages | 8 |
Journal | Cognition |
Volume | 131 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Apr 2014 |
Funding
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.
Keywords
- Infants
- Language development
- Nouns
- Selectional restrictions
- Verbs
- Word learning
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
- Language and Linguistics
- Developmental and Educational Psychology
- Linguistics and Language
- Cognitive Neuroscience