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ERIC Number: EJ1031435
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2014
Pages: 16
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1547-5441
EISSN: N/A
Slowly but Surely: Adverbs Support Verb Learning in 2-Year-Olds
Syrett, Kristen; Arunachalam, Sudha; Waxman, Sandra R.
Language Learning and Development, v10 n3 p263-278 2014
To acquire the meanings of verbs, toddlers make use of the surrounding linguistic information. For example, 2-year-olds successfully acquire novel transitive verbs that appear in semantically rich frames containing content nouns ("The boy is gonna pilk a balloon"), but they have difficulty with pronominal frames ("He is gonna pilk it") (Arunachalam & Waxman, 2010). We hypothesized that adverbs might facilitate toddlers' verb learning in these sparse pronominal frames if their semantic content directed toddlers' attention to aspects of the event that are relevant to the verb's meaning (e.g., the manner of motion). As predicted, the semantic information from a specific manner-of-motion adverb ("slowly") supported verb learning, but other adverbs lacking this semantic content ("nicely", "right now") did not. These results provide the first evidence that adverbs can facilitate verb learning in toddlers and highlight the interaction of syntactic and semantic information in word learning.
Psychology Press. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 325 Chestnut Street Suite 800, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Fax: 215-625-2940; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Illinois
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A