Examining children’s verb learning in the United States and Japan: Do comparisons help?

Abstract

Learning verbs is an important part of learning one’s native language. Prior studies have shown that children younger than 5 years can have difficulty in learning and extending new verbs. The current study extended these studies by showing children multiple events that can be compared during learning, including Japanese- and English-speaking children. In the study, 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds saw two similar events and then one varied (progressive alignment) or three varied (low alignable) events in a learning phase before test, and this was repeated for four sets. Children were asked to extend these novel verbs in easy (non-cross-mapping) and difficult (cross-mapping) test trials. A repeated-measures analysis of variance showed a significant Age by Condition interaction. In contrast to prior results, the 4-year-olds in both languages did well in both conditions and across test trial types. The 3-year-olds, especially in Japanese, performed best in the progressive alignment condition, showing that experience in seeing similar events was useful for verb learning. The 2-year-olds mostly struggled in this task, showing success only in the low-alignment condition, non-cross-mapping (easy) test trial. These are new findings given that no previous study has examined the role of different levels of variability during learning in a cross-language sample, and no prior study has examined the impact of objects at test in this way. This study shows that an important mechanism for verb learning—the comparison of events—could be useful across languages.