TY - JOUR
T1 - Linguistic Context in Verb Learning
T2 - Less is Sometimes More
AU - He, Angela Xiaoxue
AU - Kon, Maxwell
AU - Arunachalam, Sudha
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful to the families who participated in this study, to the members of the Boston University Child Language Lab who assisted with participant recruitment and data collection, and to anonymous reviewers who helped us improve the quality of the manuscript. A subset of the data was published in the Proceedings Supplement of the 40th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. This research was supported by NIH grants K01DC013306 and R01DC016592. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official view of the National Institutes of Health.
Funding Information:
This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [NIH K01DC013306,R01DC016592]. We are grateful to the families who participated in this study, to the members of the Boston University Child Language Lab who assisted with participant recruitment and data collection, and to anonymous reviewers who helped us improve the quality of the manuscript. A subset of the data was published in the Proceedings Supplement of the 40th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. This research was supported by NIH grants K01DC013306 and R01DC016592. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official view of the National Institutes of Health.
PY - 2020/1/2
Y1 - 2020/1/2
N2 - Linguistic contexts provide useful information about verb meanings by narrowing the space of candidate concepts. Intuitively, the more information, the better. For example, “the tall girl is fezzing,” as compared to “the girl is fezzing,” provides more information about which event, out of multiple candidate events, is being labeled; thus, we may expect it to better facilitate verb learning. However, we find evidence to the contrary: in a verb learning study, preschoolers (N = 60, mean age = 38 months) only performed above chance when the subject was an unmodified determiner phase, but not when it was modified (Experiment 1). Experiment 2 replicated this pattern with a different set of stimuli and a wider age range (N = 60, mean age = 45 months). Further, in Experiment 2, we looked at both learning outcomes—by evaluating pointing responses at Test, and also the learning process—by tracking eye gaze during Familiarization. The results suggest that children’s limited processing abilities are to blame for poor learning outcomes, but that a nuanced understanding of how processing affects learning is required.
AB - Linguistic contexts provide useful information about verb meanings by narrowing the space of candidate concepts. Intuitively, the more information, the better. For example, “the tall girl is fezzing,” as compared to “the girl is fezzing,” provides more information about which event, out of multiple candidate events, is being labeled; thus, we may expect it to better facilitate verb learning. However, we find evidence to the contrary: in a verb learning study, preschoolers (N = 60, mean age = 38 months) only performed above chance when the subject was an unmodified determiner phase, but not when it was modified (Experiment 1). Experiment 2 replicated this pattern with a different set of stimuli and a wider age range (N = 60, mean age = 45 months). Further, in Experiment 2, we looked at both learning outcomes—by evaluating pointing responses at Test, and also the learning process—by tracking eye gaze during Familiarization. The results suggest that children’s limited processing abilities are to blame for poor learning outcomes, but that a nuanced understanding of how processing affects learning is required.
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U2 - 10.1080/15475441.2019.1676751
DO - 10.1080/15475441.2019.1676751
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85076457133
VL - 16
SP - 22
EP - 42
JO - Language Learning and Development
JF - Language Learning and Development
SN - 1547-5441
IS - 1
ER -