Mechanism of verb learning: How young children infer meanings of novel verbs

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Learning new words in action scenes involves at least three cognitive processes: (1) identify the word's form class; (2) map the target word to the appropriate referent in the scene; (3) determine how the word should be generalized. In particular, a learner needs to know, given the word's form class, what element of the scene is relevant for generalization of the word, and what elements are not. The present research examined how 3- and 5-year-old Japanese children map a novel noun and a verb to a dynamic action event and generalize them to new instances.The results of five studies converged to suggest that, while both 3- and 5-year-olds are able to map a noun to a novel object and generalize the noun on the basis of the sameness of the object regardless of the action associated with the object, only 5-year-olds understand that verbs should be generalized on the sameness of the action per se independent of the theme object.