Doing More with Less: Verb Learning in Korean-Acquiring 24-Month-Olds.

Research on early word learning reveals that verbs present a unique challenge. While English-acquiring 24-month-olds can learn novel verbs and extend them to new scenes, they perform better in rich linguistic contexts (when novel verbs appear with fully lexicalized noun phrases naming the event participants) than in sparser linguistic contexts (Arunachalam & Waxman, 2011; Waxman et al., 2009). However, in languages like Korean, where noun phrases are often omitted when their referents are highly accessible, rich linguistic contexts are less frequent. The current study investigates the influence of rich and sparse linguistic contexts in verb learning in Korean-acquiring 24-month-olds. In contrast to their English-acquiring counterparts, 24-month-olds acquiring Korean perform better when novel verbs appear in sparse linguistic contexts. These results, which provide the first experimental evidence on early verb learning in Korean, indicate that the optimal context for verb learning depends on many factors, including how event participants are typically referred to in the language being acquired.

What does it mean to 'live' and 'die'? A cross-linguistic analysis of parent-child conversations in English and Indonesian.

Previous work on children's intuitive knowledge about the natural world has documented their difficulty in acquiring an overarching concept of biological life that includes plants as well as humans and non-human animals. It has also suggested that the acquisition of fundamental biological concepts like alive and die may be influenced by the language used to describe them, as evidenced by differences between English- and Indonesian-speaking children's performance in tasks involving these concepts. Here, we examine one particularly important source of linguistic information available to children during this acquisition process: everyday conversations with their parents. We take a cross-linguistic approach in analysing the evidence available to English- and Indonesian-speaking children as they acquire meanings for words corresponding to the concepts alive and die. Our analysis illustrates that young children acquiring English and Indonesian are faced with distinct problems, but that parental input in both languages does little to support the acquisition of broad, inclusive biological concepts.

Unmasking "Alive:" Children's Appreciation of a Concept Linking All Living Things.

Decades of research have documented in school-aged children a persistent difficulty apprehending an overarching biological concept that encompasses animate entities like humans and non-human animals, as well as plants. This has led many researchers to conclude that young children have yet to integrate plants and animate entities into a concept LIVING THING. However, virtually all investigations have used the word "alive" to probe children's understanding, a term that technically describes all living things, but in practice is often aligned with animate entities only. We show that when "alive" is replaced with less ambiguous probes, children readily demonstrate knowledge of an overarching concept linking plants with humans and non-human animals. This work suggests that children have a burgeoning appreciation of this fundamental biological concept, and that the word "alive" paradoxically masks young children's appreciation of the concept to which it is meant to refer.