How Infants Link Nonce Phrases to Scenes With Objects and Predicates

When infants hear sentences containing unfamiliar words, are some language-world links (such as noun-object) more readily formed than others (verb-predicate)? We examined English learning 14-15-month-olds' capacity for linking referents in scenes with bisyllabic nonce utterances. Each of the two syllables referred either to the object's identity, or the object's motion. Infants heard the syllables in either a Verb-Subject (VS) or Subject-Verb (SV) order. Learning was tested using preferential looking. The results showed that infants learned the nouns and verbs equally well. In addition, in both the VS- and SV-consistent conditions, infants learned the meaning of the utterance-final syllable, but not the utterance-initial one. A follow-up experiment that manipulated the prosodic cues of the test phrases confirmed that infants had decomposed the bisyllabic phrases into two distinct word-units. Thus, any biases potentially favoring noun or verb learning played a smaller role than utterance position did when noun and verb learning were equally supported by context.