About this session

Saturday, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Developing a comprehensive understanding of word learning processes beyond nouns

Early word learning requires mapping a linguistic label to the corresponding referent in visual scenes. One fundamental issue is referential ambiguity, given the many potential referents in young learners’ visual environment for any word form (Quine, 1960). Extensive evidence demonstrates a noun advantage in word learning, partly because nouns have relatively concrete representations. Nonetheless, word categories beyond nouns– such as verbs– start entering immediately or soon after some initial nouns are learned. Even so, learning mechanisms underlying word acquisition beyond nouns have received relatively less attention. Given this, what processes do young children use to learn abstract representations, such as for verbs or relations?

This symposium focuses on word learning mechanisms beyond nouns, with four talks discussing word learning of different lexical categories with various methodological approaches. The first presenter compares infants’ attention patterns while hearing nouns and verbs and highlights the importance of parental referential input. The second presenter discusses young toddlers’ attentional strategies in distinguishing novel verbs from distractors in an eye-tracking paradigm. The third talk examines whether analogical gestures improve preschoolers’ understanding of abstract relations through an experimental approach. The fourth presenter identifies parental demonstrative usage and its impacts on infants’ understanding of pronouns and identifies the spatial locations of attended objects during play.

Together, the proposed symposium offers the opportunity to discuss children’s developing understanding of abstract representations and focuses on the role of visual attention in the learning processes that might be uniquely associated with different lexical categories.

Paper #1
Title	The role of parental scaffolding in Infant’s visual experiences when hearing nouns versus verbs
Presenting author	Lichao Sun, University of Houston, United States

Paper #2
Title	Children learning verbs need to ignore distractions: Can they?
Presenting author	Jane Childers, Trinity University, United States

Paper #3
Title	The Role of Analogical Gestures in Five-Year-Olds’ Analogical Reasoning
Presenting author	Alice Xu, University of California, Los Angeles, United States

Paper #4
Title	You've got THIS! Investigating Children’s Acquisition of Demonstratives in Naturalistic Interaction
Presenting author	Yayun Zhang, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands

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Session chair
Lichao Sun, University of Houston, United States

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