TY - JOUR
T1 - 2.5-Year-olds use cross-situational consistency to learn verbs under referential uncertainty
AU - Scott, Rose M.
AU - Fisher, Cynthia
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by a predoctoral traineeship from NIMH (1 T32 MH1819990) to Rose Scott, by grants from the NIH (HD054448) and NSF (BCS 06-20257) to Cynthia Fisher, and by the Research Board of the University of Illinois. We would like to thank Renée Baillargeon, Andrei Cimpian, and Katherine Messenger for helpful comments on our manuscript; the staff of the University of Illinois Language Acquisition Lab for their help in data collection; and the parents and infants who participated in this research.
PY - 2012/2
Y1 - 2012/2
N2 - Recent evidence shows that children can use cross-situational statistics to learn new object labels under referential ambiguity (e.g., Smith & Yu, 2008). Such evidence has been interpreted as support for proposals that statistical information about word-referent co-occurrence plays a powerful role in word learning. But object labels represent only a fraction of the vocabulary children acquire, and arguably represent the simplest case of word learning based on observations of world scenes. Here we extended the study of cross-situational word learning to a new segment of the vocabulary, action verbs, to permit a stronger test of the role of statistical information in word learning. In two experiments, on each trial 2.5-year-olds encountered two novel intransitive (e.g., " She's pimming!" ; Experiment 1) or transitive verbs (e.g., " She's pimming her toy!" ; Experiment 2) while viewing two action events. The consistency with which each verb accompanied each action provided the only source of information about the intended referent of each verb. The 2.5-year-olds used cross-situational consistency in verb learning, but also showed significant limits on their ability to do so as the sentences and scenes became slightly more complex. These findings help to define the role of cross-situational observation in word learning.
AB - Recent evidence shows that children can use cross-situational statistics to learn new object labels under referential ambiguity (e.g., Smith & Yu, 2008). Such evidence has been interpreted as support for proposals that statistical information about word-referent co-occurrence plays a powerful role in word learning. But object labels represent only a fraction of the vocabulary children acquire, and arguably represent the simplest case of word learning based on observations of world scenes. Here we extended the study of cross-situational word learning to a new segment of the vocabulary, action verbs, to permit a stronger test of the role of statistical information in word learning. In two experiments, on each trial 2.5-year-olds encountered two novel intransitive (e.g., " She's pimming!" ; Experiment 1) or transitive verbs (e.g., " She's pimming her toy!" ; Experiment 2) while viewing two action events. The consistency with which each verb accompanied each action provided the only source of information about the intended referent of each verb. The 2.5-year-olds used cross-situational consistency in verb learning, but also showed significant limits on their ability to do so as the sentences and scenes became slightly more complex. These findings help to define the role of cross-situational observation in word learning.
KW - Language acquisition
KW - Statistical learning
KW - Verb learning
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.10.010
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.10.010
M3 - Article
C2 - 22104489
AN - SCOPUS:84155164933
SN - 0010-0277
VL - 122
SP - 163
EP - 180
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
IS - 2
ER -