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A Cross‐Linguistic Study of Word‐Mapping in 18‐ to 20‐Month‐Old Infants
Author(s) -
Katerelos Marina,
PoulinDubois Diane,
OshimaTakane Yuriko
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
infancy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.361
H-Index - 69
eISSN - 1532-7078
pISSN - 1525-0008
DOI - 10.1111/j.1532-7078.2010.00064.x
Subject(s) - salience (neuroscience) , psychology , habituation , object (grammar) , motion (physics) , linguistics , word (group theory) , focus (optics) , noun , cognitive psychology , artificial intelligence , computer science , neuroscience , philosophy , physics , optics
This study was designed to examine whether infants acquiring languages that place a differential emphasis on nouns and verbs, focus their attention on motions or objects in the presence of a novel word. An infant‐controlled habituation paradigm was used to teach 18‐ to 20‐month‐old English‐, French‐, and Japanese‐speaking infants’ novel words for events. Infants were habituated to two word‐event pairings and then presented with new combinations that involved a familiar word with a new object or motion, or both. Children could map the novel word to both the object and the motion, despite the differential salience of object and motion words in their native language. A control experiment with no label confirmed that both object and motion changes were detectable.