20-Month-Old infants’ Use of Noun and Verb Morphosyntactic Cues in Novel Word Learning in Dynamic Events

ABSTRACT

Using a habituation paradigm with a three-switch design, the present study investigated whether 20-month-old French-learning infants use noun and verb morphosyntactic cues to learn novel words in dynamic events differentially when both the agent and the action interpretations are possible. Of particular interest was whether infants’ initial interpretation of novel nouns referring to novel animate objects in dynamic events includes not only the novel agents but also their actions. The following two contrastive hypotheses were specifically tested: (1) infants map novel verbs to the novel actions only and novel nouns to the novel agents only. Alternatively, (2) they map novel verbs to the novel actions only but novel nouns to both the novel agents and their actions. Infants watched dynamic events in which novel agents performed novel intransitive actions, while hearing novel words in a noun phrase or a verb sentence. When novel words were preceded by a pronoun “il”, infants were able to map novel verbs to the actions but not to the agents. However, when novel words were preceded by a determiner “un”, they mapped the novel nouns to both the agents and their actions. Two follow-up noun experiments showed that they mapped the novel nouns onto the agents and their actions, even when additional noun morphosyntactic cues were given. These findings demonstrate that 20-month-old infants are able to use noun and verb morphosyntactic cues to learn novel words in dynamic events differentially and provide some evidence to support that infants’ initial representations of novel nouns referring to novel animate objects in dynamic events include both the agents and their actions.

Acknowledgments

We thank parents and children for their participation in this study, Junko Ariyama, Jillian Satin, Katherine Milette, Lauren Feiden, Stephanie Girard, Patricia Groleau, Alexandra Bacopulos-Viau, and Sabrina Papadopoli for their assistance in creating stimuli, scheduling and testing participants, and entering the data into SPSS data files and Michelle Ma for proofreading of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data sharing and data accessibility

The data that support the findings of this paper are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Ethics approval statement

This study was approved by the Research Ethics Board of McGill University.

Notes

¹ Interlinear glosses for all non-English sentence examples are provided in the Appendix.

² Some infants frequently looked at their parent at the beginning of the habituation trials probably because they wanted to know their parent’s reaction to the animations. Since their looking time during the first four habituation trials tended to be shorter and to make the coding unreliable, they were classified as excessive social referencing and excluded from the analysis.

³ Infants who recovered interest to the baseline event (looked for 89% or more of the total trial time) were excluded because they were judged not to have fully processed the habituation events.

⁴ The significance level was 0.05 and the marginal significance level was 0.05 < p < .075 for all statistical tests used in the present paper.

⁵ A one-tailed test was used when there was a priori prediction about the directionality of the difference, whereas a two-tailed test was used when there was no a priori prediction about the directionality of the difference (Ferguson & Takane, 1989).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (#410-2006-2215, #410-2011-1685) and from Fonds de Recherche du Québéc-Société et Culture (#2010-SE-130727, #2016-SE-188196).