1. A Cross-Linguistic Study of Word-Mapping in 18- to 20-Month-Old Infants.
- Author
-
Katerelos, Marina, Poulin-Dubois, Diane, and Oshima-Takane, Yuriko
- Subjects
- *
ANALYSIS of variance , *STATISTICAL correlation , *EXPERIMENTAL design , *COMPARATIVE grammar , *INFANT psychology , *INFANT development , *LANGUAGE & languages , *LEARNING , *MOTION pictures , *MULTIVARIATE analysis , *SCIENTIFIC observation , *RESEARCH funding , *STATISTICS , *T-test (Statistics) , *VIDEO recording , *VOCABULARY , *DATA analysis , *TASK performance , *PHONOLOGICAL awareness , *INTER-observer reliability , *REPEATED measures design , *DESCRIPTIVE statistics - Abstract
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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2011
- Full Text
- View/download PDF