Doing More With Less: Verb Learning in Korean-Acquiring 24-Month-Olds

Abstract

Research on early word learning reveals that verbs present a unique challenge. While English-acquiring 24-month-olds can learn novel verbs and extend them to new scenes, they perform better in rich linguistic contexts (when novel verbs appear with lexicalized noun phrases naming the event participants) than in sparser linguistic contexts (Arunachalam & Waxman 2011) However, in languages like Korean, where noun phrases are often omitted when their referents are highly accessible, rich linguistic contexts are less frequent. The current study investigates the influence of rich and sparse linguistic contexts in verb learning in Korean-acquiring 24-month-olds. In contrast to their English-acquiring counterparts, 24-month-olds acquiring Korean perform better when novel verbs appear in sparse linguistic contexts. These results, which provide the first experimental evidence on early verb learning in Korean, indicate that the optimal context for verb learning depends on many factors, including how event participants are typically referred to in the language being acquired.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was supported by NIH grant HD30410 to SRW and a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society to SA. We are grateful to the children and caretakers who participated in this study, to Esther Chung, Debbie Hong, and Mihwa Kim for Korean proofreading assistance, and to Esther Chung, Eileen Graf, and Sid Horton for their helpful insights. All errors are of course our own.

Notes

¹Japanese child-directed speech has similar rates of noun ellipsis as Korean (Y.-J. Kim 2000).

²In Korean child-directed speech, objects are dropped 40–50% of the time, and subjects are dropped over 60% of the time (Y.-J. Kim 2000). Despite the asymmetry, both argument types are dropped frequently.

³This is likely true for English toddlers as well: even though English speakers typically replace full noun phrases with pronouns when there is sufficient linguistic and observational support, English-acquiring toddlers nonetheless are unable to establish the meaning of novel transitive verbs when they are presented in sentences with pronouns (rather than full noun phrases; Arunachalam & Waxman 2011).