Two-Year-Olds' Acquisition of Novel Adjectives in Prenominal and Predicative Sentence Frames

The purpose of this experimental study was to determine whether toddlers could learn novel adjective meanings when the adjectives appeared prenominally (e.g., "This is a fip cup") and/or when they appeared predicatively (e.g., "This cup is fip").

Two-year-olds (N = 64) participated online on the Children Helping Science platform. They were randomly assigned to either the prenominal or predicative condition, and they viewed videos that introduced novel adjectives in that position in the context of two potential visual referents (e.g., yellow cup, blue door). At test, they viewed two new objects (e.g., yellow shirt, blue shirt) and were asked to point to the one that matched the novel adjective label. The child's caregiver clicked on the image the child pointed to.

Toddlers learned novel adjectives that appeared prenominally, as indicated by above-chance selection of the target referent at test, but they were at chance in the predicative condition.

The results indicate that the ease of learning a new adjective is influenced by the construction in which it appears. On a first encounter with a novel adjective, the higher frequency prenominal construction may be more supportive for learning.