Prior Experience With Unlabeled Actions Promotes 3-Year-Old Children’s Verb Learning

This study investigated what type of prior experience with unlabeled actions promotes 3-year-old children’s verb learning. We designed a novel verb learning task in which we manipulated prior experience with unlabeled actions and the gesture type children saw with this prior experience. Experiment 1 showed that children (N = 96) successfully generalized more novel verbs when they had prior experience with unlabeled exemplars of the referent actions (“relevant exemplars”), but only if the referent actions were highlighted with iconic gestures during prior experience. Experiment 2 showed that children (N = 48) successfully generalized more novel verbs when they had prior experience with one relevant exemplar and an iconic gesture than with two relevant exemplars (i.e., the same referent action performed by different actors) shown simultaneously. However, children also successfully generalized verbs above chance in the two-relevant-exemplars condition (without the help of iconic gesture). Overall, these findings suggest that prior experience with unlabeled actions is an important first step in children’s verb learning process, provided that children get a cue for focusing on the relevant information (i.e., actions) during prior experience so that they can create stable memory representations of the actions. Such stable action memory representations promote verb learning because they make the actions stand out when children later encounter labeled exemplars of the same actions. Adults can provide top-down cues (e.g., iconic gestures) and bottom-up cues (e.g., simultaneous exemplars) to focus children’s attention on actions; however, iconic gesture is more beneficial for successful verb learning than simultaneous exemplars.