Previous research has shown that Japanese-speaking 20-month-old children associate novel words with objects over actions when the words are presented as a single word. This study investigated young Japanese children's ability to use verb morphosyntactic cues in input to form associations between novel words and actions using a habituation paradigm with a switch design. Sixteen 20-month-old Japanese children were habituated to novel words in a verb syntactic frame paired with movies that show novel objects engaging in unfamiliar actions. The children were then tested with three trials in which one of the original word, object, or action was switched. The results indicate that children mapped the novel words onto the actions, rather than onto the objects. These, along with the previous findings, suggest that Japanese children become sensitive to verb morphosyntactic cues in input and use them in learning words for actions by the age of 20 months.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.81262 |
| Date | January 2004 |
| Creators | Ariyama, Junko |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (School of Communication Sciences and Disorders.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002182630, proquestno: AAIMR06372, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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