Children's Use of Intentionality Cues in Verb Learning

Abstract

Attempts to discern how children solve the problem of learning language have tended to focus on nouns, but few studies (Carpenter, Akhtar, & Tomasello, 1998) discuss the acquisition of verbs. While noun learning can be attributed largely to the whole-object and the mutual exclusivity assumptions (Markman, 1985), a possible tool for verb acquisition uses intentionality cues, for which one assumes that novel verbs refer to intentional actions. To test this hypothesis, we presented children aged 22-26 months with a dual display of paired action videos, one representing an accidental action and the other representing an intentional action. The action streams in each pair of videos were identical; they differed only in the object being manipulated and contextual information that distinguished which action was categorized as intentional and which accidental. By asking children to choose the video that portrays the novel verb, we can interpret the child's use of intentional cues. Children pointing to the intentional video would support our hypothesis; children pointing to the accidental videos would dispute it.