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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 18, 2026

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

Published on: April 19, 2017

Meaning from syntax: evidence from 2-year-olds.

Sudha Arunachalam¹, Sandra R Waxman

¹Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA. s-arunachalam@northwestern.edu

|December 1, 2009

Summary

Toddlers can learn verb meanings from grammar alone, even without seeing an event. Syntactic context helps two-year-olds infer verb meaning and guide their visual search for referents.

Area of Science:

Developmental Psychology
Linguistics
Cognitive Science

Background:

Syntactic context aids toddlers in verb meaning acquisition when visual events are present.
Previous research indicates a link between syntax and verb meaning in early language development.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether syntactic information alone supports toddlers' verb meaning identification in the absence of visual referents.
To determine if toddlers use syntactic cues to infer verb meaning and direct their attention.

Main Methods:

Two-year-olds were exposed to novel verbs in either transitive or intransitive sentence structures without accompanying visual scenes.
Following the linguistic input, toddlers were presented with two visual scenes depicting synchronous actions versus a causative action.

More Related Videos

Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm

Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm

Published on: April 28, 2016

Related Experiment Videos

Last Updated: Jun 18, 2026

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

Published on: April 19, 2017

Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm

Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm

Published on: April 28, 2016

Participants were asked to 'find' the novel verb, and their scene choices were recorded.

Main Results:

Toddlers hearing verbs in transitive sentences preferentially selected the causative action scene.
Toddlers hearing verbs in intransitive sentences did not show a preference for the causative scene.
This indicates toddlers used syntactic information to infer verb meaning.

Conclusions:

Two-year-olds can infer crucial verb meaning components solely from syntactic structure.
Syntactic cues alone are sufficient to guide toddlers' referent search in a visual scene.
Grammatical information plays a critical role in early word learning, independent of immediate visual context.