Do verbal cues facilitate the learning of nouns?
Marie Lippeveld & Yuriko Oshima-Takane Department of Psychology, McGill University
Abstract
Previous research has shown that object manipulation is an important factor for young children to extend object names by function. We investigated whether French-speaking children under 3 years of age are able to extend the names of novel objects by function, without prior object manipulation, when they hear the verb form of the novel noun. Children in the specific verb condition heard a novel noun as well as its verb form denoting the function of the object during the teaching trial, while those in the non-specific condition heard a novel noun and a general-purpose verb. The results indicate that only children in the specific verb condition were able to extend the novel name to a previously unseen object by function.
