| Paradoxically, although relational words, such as verbs, prepositions, and adverbs are more difficult for children to learn than nouns, at least some words of these types are found in children's earliest vocabularies (Gentner, 1982). In explaining this phenomenon, most current theories lie between the historical extremes of endowing children with innate, universal concepts, and proposing that children form concepts based almost entirely on the language that they hear. Building from Gentner's (2003) theory of relational word learning, we propose that universal concepts initially help children focus on particular aspects of an event, but that from early on, children can use linguistic cues to limit the possible meanings of a novel verb. To test these predictions, 3 experiments were performed using the preferential looking paradigm. In each experiment, 2 and 2½-year-olds, were taught a novel label for a novel action with distinct path and manner components. In Experiment 1, children saw an animated star, "Starry", performing one manner (e.g., SPIN) along one path (e.g., AROUND a ball) accompanied by a novel verb ("Starry's blicking"). As predicted by universalist claims and Gentner's (2003) structure-mapping strategy, children with vocabularies high in relational words extended the novel verb label to the action's path. In Experiment 2, Starry performed one manner (e.g., SPIN) along multiple paths (e.g., AROUND, UNDER, IN FRONT, OVER a ball). Contrary to predictions, the children were unable to label the action's manner despite the use of a common word across exemplars. The children in Experiment 3 also saw one manner along multiple paths, but the syntax of the sentence was altered to indicate a manner verb, ("Starry's blicking around the ball"). With these cues, children with vocabularies high in relational words were able to use linguistic cues and extend the novel verb to the action's manner. Thus, as predicted, children start with universal mapping preferences, but from early in language development they can use linguistic cues to uncover a verb's meaning. Further, these findings indicate that, due to the difficulty of the task, even the most linguistically and conceptually advanced children need to coordinate both universal and language-specific cues when learning a novel verb. Implications for broader word learning theories are discussed. |
