Prior experience with unlabeled actions promotes 3-year-old children's verb learning.

Sotaro Kita,Suzanne Aussems,Katherine H Mumford

doi:10.1037/xge0001071

Abstract

This study investigated what type of prior experience with unlabeled actions promotes 3-year-old children’s verb learning. We designed a novel verb learning task in which we manipulated prior experience with unlabeled actions and the gesture type children saw with this prior experience. Experiment 1 showed that children (N = 96) successfully generalized more novel verbs when they had prior experience with unlabeled exemplars of the referent actions (“relevant exemplars”), but only if the referent actions were highlighted with iconic gestures during prior experience. Experiment 2 showed that children (N = 48) successfully generalized more novel verbs when they had prior experience with one relevant exemplar and an iconic gesture than with two relevant exemplars (i.e., the same referent action performed by different actors) shown simultaneously. However, children also successfully generalized verbs above chance in the two-relevant-exemplars condition (without the help of iconic gesture). Overall, these findings suggest that prior experience with unlabeled actions is an important first step in children’s verb learning process, provided that children get a cue for focusing on the relevant information (i.e., actions) during prior experience so that they can create stable memory representations of the actions. Such stable action memory representations promote verb learning because they make the actions stand out when children later encounter labeled exemplars of the same actions. Adults can provide top-down cues (e.g., iconic gestures) and bottom-up cues (e.g., simultaneous exemplars) to focus children’s attention on actions; however, iconic gesture is more beneficial for successful verb learning than simultaneous exemplars.

Highlights

Figuring out the meaning of a novel verb is a challenging task for young children. Quine (1960) notes that even in ostensive situations, a novel verb could refer to an infinite number of referents
This study examined whether prior experience with unlabeled actions promotes 3-yearold children’s verb learning, and if so, what type of prior experience works best
Our study shows that children can take advantage of prior experience with unlabeled exemplars in verb learning, but only when children were given a cue for focusing on action during prior experience

Summary

Introduction

Figuring out the meaning of a novel verb is a challenging task for young children. Quine (1960) notes that even in ostensive situations, a novel verb could refer to an infinite number of referents. This study shows that when children are presented sequentially with multiple different labeled action exemplars, they can compare those exemplars and extract the consistent component that is shared between those exemplars, which is important for learning the meaning of that verb (i.e., manners, results) This ability to compare exemplars and extract relevant information facilitates children’s verb learning and generalization. Children who saw two different labeled exemplars of the same action simultaneously (i.e. when the same action was performed on two different objects) successfully generalized the newly learned verbs to novel events that maintained the actions This suggests that simultaneously presented exemplars can support verb learning in 3-year-olds, but only when the content of the exemplars varies (i.e., the action component that is relevant for verb meaning is kept consistent across exemplars, but components irrelevant to verb meaning vary)

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion