Verb Learning In Children Research Articles

Can 3-year-old children learn verbs using an educational touchscreen app?

IntroductionResearch demonstrates that children can learn nouns using touchscreen apps, however there has been less attention to whether apps can also promote verb learning. In addition, only a few studies have investigated the role of adult-child co-use for facilitating language learning from touchscreen apps.MethodIn the present study, 3-year-old children were taught three novel verbs in a live condition or with an app. Children in the app condition either used the app in a child-led interaction or an adult-led interaction. Children's verb learning was assessed using a three-choice pointing task.Results and discussionOnly children in the live condition showed evidence of verb learning and performed above chance, and there were no differences in performance by children in the app conditions. Children therefore did not show evidence of verb learning from our experimental app. Further research therefore needs to investigate different strategies for adult-child co-use and the role of different app features for supporting children's verb learning from apps.

Can Retrieval Practice Facilitate Verb Learning in Children With Developmental Language Disorder and Their Peers With Typical Language Development?

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have well-documented verb learning difficulties. In this study, we asked whether the inclusion of retrieval practice during the learning period would facilitate these children's verb learning relative to a similar procedure that provided no retrieval opportunities. Eleven children with DLD (M age = 60.09 months) and 12 children with typical language development (TD; M age = 59.92 months) learned four novel verbs in a repeated spaced retrieval (RSR) condition and four novel verbs in a repeated study (RS) condition. The words in the two conditions were heard an equal number of times, in the context of video-recorded actors performing novel actions. Recall testing immediately after the learning period and 1 week later revealed greater recall for novel verbs in the RSR condition than for novel verbs in the RS condition. This was true for both groups, and for immediate as well as 1-week testing. The RSR advantage remained when children had to recall the novel verbs while watching new actors perform the novel actions. However, when tested in contexts requiring the children to inflect the novel verbs with -ing for the first time, the children with DLD were much less likely to do so than their peers with TD. Even words in the RSR condition were only inconsistently inflected. Retrieval practice provides benefits to verb learning-an important finding given the challenges that verbs present to children with DLD. However, these benefits do not appear to automatically translate to the process of adding inflections to newly learned verbs but rather appear to be limited to the operations of learning the verbs' phonetic forms and mapping these forms onto associated actions.

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

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.

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder May Learn from Caregiver Verb Input Better in Certain Engagement States.

The relation between caregiver follow-in utterances with verbs presented in different states of dyadic engagement and later child expressive verb vocabulary in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was examined in 29 toddlers with ASD and their caregivers. Caregiver verb input in follow-in utterances presented during higher order supported joint engagement (HSJE) accounted for a significant, large amount of variance in later child verb vocabulary; R2= .26. This relation remained significant when controlling for early verb vocabulary or verb input in lower support engagement states. Other types of talk in follow-in utterances in HSJE did not correlate with later verb vocabulary. These findings are an important step towards identifying interactional contexts that facilitate verb learning in children with ASD.

Acquisition of Verb Meaning From Syntactic Distribution in Preschoolers With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Our goal was to investigate whether preschool children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can begin to learn new word meanings by attending to the linguistic contexts in which they occur, even in the absence of visual or social context. We focused on verbs because of their importance for subsequent language development. Thirty-two children with ASD, ages 2;1-4;5 (years;months), participated in a verb-learning task. In a between-subjects design, they were randomly assigned to hear novel verbs in either transitive or intransitive syntactic frames while watching an unrelated silent animation or playing quietly with a toy. In an eye-tracking test, they viewed two video scenes, one depicting a causative event (e.g., boy spinning girl) and the other depicting synchronous events (e.g., boy and girl waving). They were prompted to find the referents of the novel verbs, and their eye gaze was measured. Like typically developing children in prior work, children with ASD who had heard the verbs in transitive syntactic frames preferred to look to the causative scene as compared to children who had heard intransitive frames. This finding replicates and extends prior work on verb learning in children with ASD by demonstrating that they can attend to a novel verb's syntactic distribution absent relevant visual or social context, and they can use this information to assign the novel verb an appropriate meaning. We discuss points for future research, including examining individual differences that may impact success and contrasting social and nonsocial word-learning tasks directly.

The benefit of simultaneously encountered exemplars and of exemplar variability to verb learning.

Young children are conservative when extending novel verbs to novel exemplars. We investigated whether multiple, simultaneously presented exemplars would aid young children's verb learning, as well as the importance of exemplar variability. Three-year-olds were taught novel verbs, while viewing either one action-scene featuring a novel action performed on a novel object, or two action-scenes side-by-side in which the action performed was the same but the object varied, or two action-scenes side-by-side in which no aspect of the scenes varied. They were asked to extend the novel verbs to one of two scenes: one that maintained the action and one that maintained the object. Findings indicated that children were only able to extend verbs correctly after viewing two action-scenes in which the content varied. These findings suggest that simultaneously presented exemplars of a verb can support verb learning in younger children, but only when the content of the exemplars varies.

Does Variability Across Events Affect Verb Learning in English, Mandarin, and Korean?

Extending new verbs is important in becoming a productive speaker of a language. Prior results show children have difficulty extending verbs when they have seen events with varied agents. This study further examines the impact of variability on verb learning and asks whether variability interacts with event complexity or differs by language. Children (aged 2½ to 3 years) in the United States, China, Korea, and Singapore learned verbs linked to simple and complex events. Sets of events included one or three agents, and children were asked to extend the verb at test. Children learning verbs linked to simple movements performed similarly across conditions. However, children learning verbs linked to events with multiple objects were less successful if those events were enacted by multiple agents. A follow-up study rules out an influence of event order. Overall, similar patterns of results emerged across languages, suggesting common cognitive processes support children's verb learning.

Book Review: Susan Douglas, Understanding actions, states and events: Verb learning in children with autism

Book Review: Susan Douglas, <i>Understanding actions, states and events: Verb learning in children with autism</i>

A Cross-Linguistic Study of Sound Symbolism in Children's Verb Learning

A long history of research has considered the role of iconicity in language and the existence and role of nonarbitrary properties in language and the use of language. Previous studies with Japanese-speaking children, whose language defines a large grammatical class of words with clear sound symbolism, suggest that iconicity properties in Japanese may aid early verb learning, and a recent extended work suggests that such early sensitivity is not limited to children whose language supports such word classes. The present study further considers the use of sound-symbolic words in verb-learning context by conducting systematic cross-linguistic comparisons on early exposure to and effect of sound symbolism in verb mapping. Experiment 1 is an observational study of how English- and Japanese-speaking parents talk about verbs. More conventionalized symbolic words were found in Japanese-speaking parental input, and more idiosyncratic use of sound symbolism was found in English-speaking parental input. Despite this different exposure of iconic forms to describe actions, the artificial verb-learning task in Experiment 2 revealed that children in both language groups benefit from sound–meaning correspondences for their verb learning. These results together confirm more extensive use of conventionalized sound symbolism among Japanese speakers and also support a cross-linguistic consistency of the effect, which has been documented in the recent work. The work also points to the potential value of understanding the contexts in which sound–meaning correspondences matter in language learning.

Verb Learning in Children With SLI

This study explored the effect of frequency (number of presentations), and spacing (period between presentations) on verb learning in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Children learn words more efficiently when presentations are frequent and appropriately spaced, and this study investigated whether children with SLI likewise benefit. Given that these children demonstrate greater frequency dependence and rapid forgetting of recently acquired words, an investigation of frequency and spacing in this population is especially warranted. Twenty-four children with SLI (mean age 5;6 [years;months]) and 24 language-matched control children (mean age 3;4) were taught novel verbs during play sessions. In a repeated measures design, 4 experimental conditions combined frequency (12 or 18 presentations) and spacing (all presentations in 1 session, or spread over 4 days). Comprehension and production probes were administered after the final session and 1 week later. Although the children with SLI benefited significantly from frequent and widely spaced presentations, there were no significant effect in the control group. The language-impaired children showed rapid forgetting. The frequency and spacing of presentations crucially affect the verb learning of children with SLI. A training regimen characterized by appropriately spaced intervals and moderate repetition will optimally benefit lexical learning.