Study provides new insight into how toddlers learn verbs

Children learn and understand the meaning of verbs when shown a variety of similar actions, rather than the same action repeatedly suggests research published today in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology.

Learning new words, for a toddler, is a huge challenge. Verbs pose particular difficulties as they refer to actions rather than objects, and actions are often different each time a child sees them; for example a child might see a woman jogging in the park and later on a man jogging in the street.

To find out more about this area of child language acquisition researchers from the University of Liverpool asked a group of toddlers to watch one of two short videos. They then examined whether different amounts of visual information affected the children’s understanding of verbs and their actions.

Dr Katherine Twomey, from the Institute of Psychology, Health and Society, said: “We wanted to find out more about the very beginnings of language acquisition, because understanding how this process begins is important to our understanding of how language develops throughout preschool and school years.”

One group of toddlers watched a video which showed a cartoon star moving across a screen and changing shape from a circle to a star, and then back to a circle, whilst a new verb was repeated.

The other group of children watched a video where the cartoon star moved across the screen and changed into three different shapes: a circle, then a star, then a square, with the same new verb being spoken alongside each shape.

Dr Twomey said: “We found that showing the toddlers similar but, importantly, not identical actions actually helped them understand what a verb refers to, instead of confusing them as you might expect.

“Children who saw the cartoon where the same action was repeated could tell the difference between the original verb and the new verb. However, children who saw the three different actions learnt more about the action, and could tell the difference between the original action category and a completely new action.

“This is the first study to show that, perhaps surprisingly, seeing lots of different actions helps children learn action types more than seeing the same action over and over again.

Dr. Jessica Horst from the University of Sussex who collaborated on the research added: “It is a crucial first step in understanding how what children see affects how they learn verbs and action categories, and provides the groundwork for future studies to examine in more detail exactly what kinds of variability affect how children learn words.”

The Society publishes 11 academic journal titles in conjunction with our publishing partner Wiley-Blackwell. The British Journal of Developmental Psychology publishes full-length, empirical, conceptual, review and discussion papers, as well as brief reports, in all aspects of Developmental Psychology. Visit the Wiley online library for more information.

Society members can access via PsychSource, our searchable journals, books and multimedia database, developed in partnership with Wiley-Blackwell. Abstracts are free to all, full-text free to members.

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