Facilitation of semantic comprehension at the one-word stage of language development.

Abstract

Early in the development of language, children must learn to relate the language they hear to objects and events in their immediate perceptual environment. Gilmore (1977) found that infants at the two-word stage of language production and, under certain conditions, some infants at the one-word stage as well, seemed to map a simple sentence (e.g. The bunny hugs the kitty) onto a visual event (which, for example, showed a puppet rabbit hugging a puppet cat). In Gilmore's experiment, a habituation series of trials, presenting either appropriate pairings of a variety of sentences with visual events (as in the above example), or inappropriate pairings (e.g. The kitty hugs the bunny, when, in fact, the reverse was true) were presented repeatedly until subjects habituated. A test series of trials followed with an inappropriate/appropriate pairing, whichever was not used during habituation. Two-word subjects seemed to discriminate between the test and habituation pairings in either case. One-word subjects seemed to discrimi- nate only when they received the appropriate pairing during habituation and the inappropriate during the test.