COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: The Origins of Verb Learning

Temple University, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

PI: Hirsh-Pasek, K. BCS-9910842 Objects, actions and events are the physical building blocks of human experience. While we know a great deal about how infants and toddlers think and talk about objects, we know very little about how they think and talk about actions. Actions are the glue around which events are organized. When a bat strikes a ball, it is the act of striking that defines the relationship between the two objects. Similarly, the verb is the "hero" of the sentence around which the rest of the sentence is organized. This project examines the ways in which infants and toddlers conceptualize action and link language to actions. Two questions are posed. The first asks how children perceive and form categories of action. Why, for example do we categorize an act of running by our grandmother as the same sort of action as that performed by Carl Lewis? The second question asks how we attach labels to those categories of action. For example, do children think that the word "running" only applies to the first person they saw performing that action? Or, do they know from the start that running applies both to the first person they saw running as well as to their grandmother and to Carl Lewis? This grant is the among the first to address these key questions about language and thought. As such, it represents a new frontier toward understanding how children learn language and in particular, how they talk about the actions they see.