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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jan 12, 2026

Quantifying Learning in Young Infants: Tracking Leg Actions During a Discovery-learning Task

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Published on: June 1, 2015

When less is more: Evidence from Korean-learning children's verb acquisition.

Angela Xiaoxue He¹, Hyun-Joo Song², Kyong-Sun Jin³

¹Department of English Language and Literature, https://ror.org/0145fw131Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China.

Journal of Child Language

|November 4, 2025

Summary

Children learning new verbs find it harder when given extra details about the subject. This study shows that less linguistic information can be more beneficial for verb acquisition in preschoolers.

Keywords:

Korean eye tracking preschoolers syntactic bootstrapping verb learning

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Last Updated: Jan 12, 2026

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Published on: June 1, 2015

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Published on: June 30, 2020

Area of Science:

Developmental Psychology
Linguistics
Cognitive Science

Background:

Linguistic context aids children's acquisition of novel verbs.
Previous research suggests modified subjects may increase processing load, hindering learning.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if Korean-learning preschoolers experience similar difficulties with modified subjects during verb learning.
To examine the cross-linguistic validity of the "less is more" hypothesis in early language acquisition.

Main Methods:

Korean-learning preschoolers were presented with novel verbs in sentences with both unmodified and modified subjects.
Performance was assessed across three distinct situational contexts to evaluate learning outcomes.

Main Results:

Preschoolers learning Korean showed difficulty processing novel verbs when subjects were modified compared to unmodified.
This learning difficulty persisted across various contexts, even when modified subjects were informative.

Conclusions:

Findings support prior English-based research, indicating that reduced linguistic complexity aids verb learning in young children.
The results provide cross-linguistic evidence for the principle that less information can be more beneficial for language acquisition.