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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.