Infant verb understanding and its links with motoric experiences

Frewin, Kelsey 2023. Infant verb understanding and its links with motoric experiences. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

Developmental theories of word learning seek to chart early linguistic milestones and aim to explain how children acquire words. Verbs are an important aspect of word learning, enabling children to communicate about actions, events, and dynamic elements of the world around them. As a primary aim, this thesis investigates whether infants have begun grasping the meaning of their first verbs by the age of 10 months. In Chapter 1, I describe how children struggle to learn verbs compared to nouns and review theories explaining this difficulty. I discuss this in reference to the “verb learning paradox” and stress the importance of investigating infants’ verb comprehension. I outline several mechanisms that may explain how children to learn verbs, including children’s own bodily actions. As such, as a secondary aim of this thesis, I explore links between infants’ motoric experiences and their verb comprehension. In Chapter 2, I present two studies exploring verb comprehension with infants aged 10- and 14-months-old using looking while listening paradigms. I show that 14-month-olds understood several verbs in the task but 10-month-olds largely performed at chance, only recognising a small number of items. I discussed several potential reasons why 10-month-olds may have struggled to understand verbs during this task. In Chapter 3, I build upon this work by investigating 10-month-olds’ verb comprehension using an implicit, neural measure of word understanding; the N400 event-related potential. I found evidence that 10-month-olds understood verbs during a semantic-priming task with a larger N400 response to mismatched, compared to matched, actions and verbs. Finally, in Chapter 4, I explored whether motor skills are differentially associated with concurrent verb, compared to noun, comprehension during the first two years of life. I show evidence that although both verb and noun understanding are linked with children’s concurrent motor skills, verb comprehension holds an especially tight association with motor development. To conclude, the findings from this thesis broaden the current understanding of the early lexicon, demonstrating that infants grasp the meanings of several verbs by at least 10 months. In Chapter 5, I discuss how future research should aim to explore which mechanistic processes support infants’ verb learning at this early stage of development. Further, my findings show that infants’ motor skills are strongly linked with their verb understanding, highlighting the importance of future research to explore the potential role infants’ actions may play in their verb learning.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Psychology
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	27 June 2023
Last Modified:	28 Jun 2023 09:42
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/160619

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