Early Action Word Learning: How Children Learn Verbs Versus Nouns
Open Access
- Author:
- Nauss, Jennifer Alicia
- Area of Honors:
- Communication Sciences and Disorders
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Krista M Wilkinson, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Krista M Wilkinson, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Carol Anne Miller, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- fast mapping
language learning
verbs
syntactic bootstrapping
mutual exclusivity - Abstract:
- While the literature on children’s early and rapid word learning is plentiful, the literature pertaining specifically to verb learning is less so. The current study aimed to answer the question, “How can we better facilitate rapid verb learning?” Typically developing 3- to 5-year-old children participated in two sessions of instruction and outcome trials and a third session of testing and probe trials. Children were presented with an unfamiliar verb, “zoar” and asked to map this new word to an actor/action pair. Participants were divided into three groups, one of which received a low level prompt (zoar), another which received a mid level prompt (zoar-ing), and the last which received a high level prompt (This one is zoaring). The children saw combinations of familiar and unfamiliar actor/action pairs on screen. In the probe stage, children were asked to extend the novel verb to the same action being performed by a new actor. Children in the first two groups (low and mid cues) struggled to correctly map the new word to the action rather than the actor. When given a full syntactic cue, as in group 3, however, most children mapped the new word to its correct action. It seems, then, that providing more complete morphological and syntactic cues allows children to overcome noun bias in their early word learning. Discussion regarding the implications of these findings follows.