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Can infants learn new function words using the semantic seed?
Date created: 2018-03-09 03:27 PM | Last Updated: 2020-06-22 12:02 PM
Category: Project
Description: Young children can exploit the syntactic contexts in which they hear a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. But how do children learn which syntactic contexts (e.g. instantiated by pronouns or articles) are linked to which semantic features (e.g. actions or objects) in the first place? The current study investigates if children can learn about a syntactic context from tracking its use with only a few familiar words from a specific semantic category. After presenting 3-4 year-olds (n=60) with a 5-min training video in which a novel function word (i.e. “ko”) either replaced pronouns or articles, children were presented with novel words co-occurring with this newly learned function word. We found that both looking behavior and pointing responses were significantly influenced by participants' assigned condition, with children in the Verb condition looking and pointing more towards the action videos than children in the Noun condition.
We aimed at testing young children, but started with a group of adults in order to get feedback on the design. The data of this control group (or pilot) are now reported in the main text of the manuscript. Since we based our design on the one used by de Carvalho, Babineau, Trueswell, & Christophe (2019), we added the results of their pilot with 10 adults (5 in each condition) on this OSF page. The…
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