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Words, words, words

L R Gleitman1

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia 19104-6196.

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences
|October 29, 1994
PubMed
Summary
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Children learn nouns by linking words to objects. For verbs, infants under two years old use sentence structure to understand word meanings, a novel sentence-to-world pairing approach.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Linguistics
  • Cognitive Science

Background:

  • Traditional theories propose word-to-world mapping for vocabulary acquisition.
  • This word-to-world model adequately explains noun acquisition in children.
  • However, this model is insufficient for explaining verb acquisition.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the mechanisms underlying verb acquisition in infants.
  • To determine if infants utilize linguistic context for learning verb meanings.
  • To propose an alternative to the word-to-world pairing hypothesis.

Main Methods:

  • Experimental study involving infants under two years of age.
  • Analysis of infants' systematic recruitment of sentence structural properties.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Observation of how novel verbs within sentences are interpreted.

    • Main Results:

    • Infants under two years old do not rely solely on word-to-world pairings for verb acquisition.
    • Infants systematically utilize the structural properties of sentences containing novel verbs.
    • This indicates a sentence-to-world pairing procedure is employed for verb meaning acquisition.

    Conclusions:

    • Infants employ a sentence-to-world pairing procedure to acquire verb meanings.
    • This contrasts with the word-to-world pairing typically observed for noun acquisition.
    • Linguistic structure plays a crucial role in early verb learning.