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Novel Nouns (novel + noun)
Selected AbstractsMapping Novel Nouns and Verbs Onto Dynamic Action Events: Are Verb Meanings Easier to Learn Than Noun Meanings for Japanese Children?CHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 2 2005Mutsumi Imai The present research examined how 3- and 5-year-old Japanese children map novel nouns and verbs onto dynamic action events and generalize them to new instances. Studies 1 to 3 demonstrated that although both 3- and 5-year-olds were able to map novel nouns onto novel objects, only 5-year-olds could generalize verbs solely on the basis of the sameness of the action. Study 4 showed that the difficulty young children experience in learning verbs lies mainly in mapping the appropriate element to a verb rather than in encoding and remembering an action itself. The results of this research are related to a long-debated issue of whether noun learning is privileged over verb learning. [source] Monolingual, bilingual, trilingual: infants' language experience influences the development of a word-learning heuristicDEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE, Issue 5 2009Krista Byers-Heinlein How infants learn new words is a fundamental puzzle in language acquisition. To guide their word learning, infants exploit systematic word-learning heuristics that allow them to link new words to likely referents. By 17 months, infants show a tendency to associate a novel noun with a novel object rather than a familiar one, a heuristic known as disambiguation. Yet, the developmental origins of this heuristic remain unknown. We compared disambiguation in 17- to 18-month-old infants from different language backgrounds to determine whether language experience influences its development, or whether disambiguation instead emerges as a result of maturation or social experience. Monolinguals showed strong use of disambiguation, bilinguals showed marginal use, and trilinguals showed no disambiguation. The number of languages being learned, but not vocabulary size, predicted performance. The results point to a key role for language experience in the development of disambiguation, and help to distinguish among theoretical accounts of its emergence. [source] The origins and evolution of links between word learning and conceptual organization: new evidence from 11-month-oldsDEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2003Sandra Waxman How do infants map words to their meaning? How do they discover that different types of words (e.g. noun, adjective) refer to different aspects of the same objects (e.g. category, property)? We have proposed that (1) infants begin with a broad expectation that novel open-class words (both nouns and adjectives) highlight commonalities (both category- and property-based) among objects, and that (2) this initial expectation is subsequently fine-tuned through linguistic experience. We examine the first part of this proposal, asking whether 11-month-old infants can construe the very same set of objects (e.g. four purple animals) either as members of an object category (e.g. animals) or as embodying a salient object property (e.g. four purple things), and whether naming (with count nouns vs. adjectives) differentially influences their construals. Results support the proposal. Infants treated novel nouns and adjectives identically, mapping both types of words to both category- and property-based commonalities among objects. [source] The Role of Diminutives in the Acquisition of Russian Gender: Can Elements of Child-Directed Speech Aid in Learning Morphology?LANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue 2 2001Vera Kempe Diminutives are a pervasive feature of child-directed speech (CDS) in Russian. Their frequent use might be beneficial for gender acquisition because it eliminates nontransparent morphophonological marking. To examine the effect of diminutives on gender learning, adult native speakers of English were taught Russian nouns, with half of the participants trained on diminutive nouns and half on the nondiminutive base forms. Over four sessions, participants learned to use adjectives that had to agree in gender with nouns. Learners were then tested on various types of novel nouns. The diminutive training group demonstrated better learning of noun gender, and better generalization to novel forms, indicating that regularization of gender marking through diminutives promotes the extraction of morphophonological regularities. [source] Mapping Novel Nouns and Verbs Onto Dynamic Action Events: Are Verb Meanings Easier to Learn Than Noun Meanings for Japanese Children?CHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 2 2005Mutsumi Imai The present research examined how 3- and 5-year-old Japanese children map novel nouns and verbs onto dynamic action events and generalize them to new instances. Studies 1 to 3 demonstrated that although both 3- and 5-year-olds were able to map novel nouns onto novel objects, only 5-year-olds could generalize verbs solely on the basis of the sameness of the action. Study 4 showed that the difficulty young children experience in learning verbs lies mainly in mapping the appropriate element to a verb rather than in encoding and remembering an action itself. The results of this research are related to a long-debated issue of whether noun learning is privileged over verb learning. [source] | ||||||||||