Syntax Constrains the Acquisition of Verb Meaning

Abstract

Can infants use the syntactic context of an unknown word to infer that it is a verb, and thus refers to an action? Twenty-three-month-old French infants watching a moving object were taught novel verbs, within sentences that contained only function words (e.g. “il poune par là” / “it's pooning there”). Infants then watched two instances of the object undergoing either the familiar or a novel action and were asked to point towards the screen matching the novel verb. Infants correctly pointed more often towards the familiar action. To check that they did not simply perseverate in pointing at the familiar scene, control infants were taught novel nouns on the same visual stimuli (e.g. “un poune est là”/ “a poon is here”). Contrary to verb-learning infants, noun-learning infants pointed more often to the novel action. These results confirm the hypothesis that function words, and more generally syntactic structure, support early lexical acquisition.

The authors wish to thank three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

¹The latter option was more likely according to data collected using the IPL paradigm with the same stimuli, see Lidz, Bunger, Leddon, & Waxman (2006).

²The pseudo-noun often came one syllable later than its verb counterpart, due to the insertion of an article, and the negative sentences used during the contrast phase do not allow a similar position for nouns and verbs in French.

³In 2.65 cases out of 8, children did not give a clear pointing response: 0.05 responses were ‘out’, 0.25 responses were ‘both’ (simultaneous pointing to both sides, using both arms), 0.65 were ‘unclear’, and for the rest of the trials, 1.7, the infants did not point at all (there were no significant differences between the Experimental and the Control groups on any of these variables).

⁴The absence of a main effect of Group indicates that children pointed equally often whether they were taught a new verb or a new noun. It might have been the case that infants in the Control group pointed less often, since they were asked a puzzling question. But they did not.

⁵Another way to look at these data is to compute the percentage of points towards the familiar action, for each infant (number of points towards familiar action, divided by total number of clear pointing responses for that infant). This percentage analysis gives the same results, with a significant preference for the familiar action in the Experimental Group (65.9%, significantly greater than chance, 50%, t(15) = 3.2, p < 0.01); and a significant preference for the novel action in the Control Group (35.5% points towards the familiar action, significantly smaller than 50%, t(15) = −2.1, p < 0.05), and the behaviour of the two groups was significantly different: t(31) = 3.6, p < 0.001.

⁶By labelling, we mean the ability to generalize the properties of one of the members of the category to the others. We do not assume that children have conscious access to abstract categories such as nouns and verbs.