TY - JOUR
T1 - Two-year-olds can begin to acquire verb meanings in socially impoverished contexts
AU - Arunachalam, Sudha
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society. A subset of the data was presented at the 37th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development and published in the Online Supplement to the BUCLD 37 proceedings. Thanks to Leah Sheline for stimuli preparation, data collection and formatting; to Georgios Tripodis for statistical consultation; to Toben Mintz and two anonymous reviewers for constructive comments; and to the participating toddlers and their families.
PY - 2013/12
Y1 - 2013/12
N2 - By two years of age, toddlers are adept at recruiting social, observational, and linguistic cues to discover the meanings of words. Here, we ask how they fare in impoverished contexts in which linguistic cues are provided, but no social or visual information is available. Novel verbs are presented in a stream of syntactically informative sentences, but the sentences are not embedded in a social context, and no visual access to the verb's referent is provided until the test phase. The results provide insight into how toddlers may benefit from overhearing contexts in which they are not directly attending to the ambient speech, and in which no conversational context, visual referent, or child-directed conversation is available.
AB - By two years of age, toddlers are adept at recruiting social, observational, and linguistic cues to discover the meanings of words. Here, we ask how they fare in impoverished contexts in which linguistic cues are provided, but no social or visual information is available. Novel verbs are presented in a stream of syntactically informative sentences, but the sentences are not embedded in a social context, and no visual access to the verb's referent is provided until the test phase. The results provide insight into how toddlers may benefit from overhearing contexts in which they are not directly attending to the ambient speech, and in which no conversational context, visual referent, or child-directed conversation is available.
KW - Language acquisition
KW - Syntactic bootstrapping
KW - Word learning
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.08.021
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.08.021
M3 - Article
C2 - 24055833
AN - SCOPUS:84884241994
VL - 129
SP - 569
EP - 573
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
SN - 0010-0277
IS - 3
ER -