Abstract
Decades of research show that children rely on the linguistic context in which novel words occur to infer their meanings. However, because learning in these studies was assessed after children had heard numerous occurrences of a novel word in informative linguistic contexts, it is impossible to determine how much exposure would be needed for a child to learn from such information. This study investigated the speed with which French 20-month-olds and 3-to-4-year-olds exploit function words to determine the syntactic category of novel words and therefore infer their meanings. In a real-time preferential looking task, participants saw two videos side-by-side on a TV-screen: one showing a person performing a novel action, and the other a person passively holding a novel object. At the same time, participants heard only three occurrences of a novel word preceded either by a determiner (e.g., “Regarde! Une dase! – “Look! A dase!”) or a pronoun (e.g., “Regarde! Elle dase!” – “Look! She’s dasing!”). 3-to-4-year-olds exploited function words to categorize novel words and infer their meanings: they looked more to the novel action in the verb condition, while participants in the noun condition looked more to the novel object. 20-month-olds, however, did not show this difference. We discuss possible reasons for why 20-month-olds may have found it difficult to infer novel word meanings in our task. Given that 20-month-olds can use function words to learn word meanings in experiments providing many repetitions, we suspect that more repetitions might be needed to observe positive effects of learning in this age range in our task. Our study establishes nevertheless that before age 4, young children become able to exploit function words to infer the meanings of unknown words as soon as they occur. This ability to interpret speech in real-time and build interpretations about novel word meanings might be extremely useful for young children to map words to their possible referents and to boost their acquisition of word meanings.
Highlights
One of the most complex tasks that humans face during language acquisition is the acquisition of word meaning
There is no evidence in the literature showing that 3-to-4-year-olds would be able to exploit function words in real-time to determine the syntactic category of novel words and infer their meanings, there is at least evidence that 3-to-5-year-olds can succeed in tasks where they needed to discover the meaning of novel verbs while watching dynamic scenes at the screen (e.g., Imai et al, 2008; Nappa et al, 2009; Arunachalam et al, 2016) and they succeed to learn novel word meanings after have heard only three occurrences of a novel word in informative linguistic contexts (e.g., Imai et al, 2005, 2008)
The study described in this paper shows that with just three occurrences of a novel word in a given syntactic context, 3to-4-year-olds are able to exploit function words in real-time to determine the syntactic category of novel words and to constrain their possible meanings
Summary
One of the most complex tasks that humans face during language acquisition is the acquisition of word meaning. Being able to rely on morpho-syntactic cues to exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to infer its potential meaning would represent an extremely powerful learning mechanism for young word learners, as the syntactic structure of sentences can help them to constrain their interpretation about what aspect of the world is been talked about (e.g., Landau and Gleitman, 1985; Gleitman, 1990; Fisher et al, 1994; Gleitman et al, 2005; Medina et al, 2011) This experiment tested whether only three occurrences of a novel word preceded either by a determiner or by a pronoun would provide enough evidence for young children to rapidly use functional elements to infer the possible meaning of novel nouns and verbs in French. Syntactic category of novel words and infer their meanings, there is at least evidence that 3-to-5-year-olds can succeed in tasks where they needed to discover the meaning of novel verbs while watching dynamic scenes at the screen (e.g., Imai et al, 2008; Nappa et al, 2009; Arunachalam et al, 2016) and they succeed to learn novel word meanings after have heard only three occurrences of a novel word in informative linguistic contexts (e.g., Imai et al, 2005, 2008)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
