Work

Slowly but Surely: Adverbs Support Verb Learning in 2-Year-Olds

Year: 2013

Type: article

Abstract: To acquire the meanings of verbs, toddlers make use of the surrounding linguistic information. For example, 2-year-olds successfully acquire novel transitive verbs that appear in semantically rich frames containing content nouns (“The boy is gonna pilk a balloon”), but they have difficulty with pronominal frames (“He is gonna pilk it”) (Arunachalam & Waxman, 2010). We hypothesized that adverbs might facilitate toddlers’ verb learning in these sparse pronominal frames if their semantic content directed toddlers’ attention to aspects of the event that are relevant to the verb’s meaning (e.g., the manner of motion). As predicted, the semantic information from a specific manner-of-motion adverb (slowly) supported verb learning, but other adverbs lacking this semantic content (nicely, right now) did not. These results provide the first evidence that adverbs can facilitate verb learning in toddlers and highlight the interaction of syntactic and semantic information in word learning.

Source: Language Learning and Development

DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2013.840493

Authors: Kristen Syrett, Sudha Arunachalam, Sandra R. Waxman

Institutions: Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Boston University, Northwestern University, Northwestern University

Language: English

Topic: Language Development and Disorders

Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funders: American Philosophical Society, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

Awards: Linking Early Linguistic and Conceptual Development, Acquiring Number Word Semantics: A Syntactic Bootstrapping Approach