Word-meaning association in early language development

Abstract

Existing word-learning experiments with preverbal infants typically use visual scenes including changing objects but constant motion, thus cueing infants to ignore the motion aspect. The present study examines whether infants naturally focus on the object or its motion if both interpretations are possible. Eleven-month-old French-learning infants were habituated to either un gope or un fime (gope, fime are nonsense words, un is a determiner), paired with a visual scene, e.g., an artificial animal jumping over a barrier. Upon habituation, infants received one baseline trial (the same audio-visual paring as in Habituation), and then two types of Test trials with scene changes: action change (the same animal doing a different motion, e.g., bouncing onto a wall), and object change (an artificial vehicle doing the same habituated motion). Test trials were presented with the same habituation speech. We expected that if infants mapped the nonsense word to the object during habituation, their looking time to the object-change scene should recover the most (indicating surprise); if they interpreted the nonsense word as the motion, looking time to the action-change scene should recover more than the object-change scene. Results showed that infants looked significantly longer at the object-change scene than the action-change and baseline scenes, suggesting that they mapped the word to the object rather than motion. Therefore, when both the object and its motion were possible interpretations, preverbal infants map a novel word as a noun. We are conducting further experiments to ascertain whether determiners contribute to infants’ noun interpretation in this task.