Early Verb Learning
My research explores when infants first begin to understand verbs and how their own experiences of acting on the world may support this process.
Around their first birthday, children begin saying their first words. For many, these are nouns, such as names for caregivers (e.g., mama) or familiar objects (e.g., ball) that feature prominently in their daily lives. However, long before they begin speaking, infants already understand many of their earliest words. Research suggests that infants know the meanings of many common nouns by 6 to 9 months of age, months before they produce their first words or their parents recognise how much they understand. For example, looking-time studies by Bergelson and Swingley (2012) and electrophysiological work by Parise and Csibra (2012) demonstrate that infants already possess knowledge of word meanings during the first year of life. Despite this early knowledge, children’s vocabularies remain dominated by nouns for some time, even though caregivers frequently use many other types of words, including verbs.
Verbs – such as “wave”, “eat”, and “open” – are essential for communication because they allow children to talk about actions, make requests, and eventually build sentences. Yet learning verbs is often more difficult than learning nouns. Unlike objects, actions are fleeting and constantly changing. To learn what a verb means, a child must focus on the relevant action at just the right moment, making it more difficult to identify what the word refers to. This may help explain why verbs typically appear later than nouns in children’s spoken vocabularies. As with nouns, children likely understand verbs before they can say them, but exactly when this early understanding begins has remained an open question.
When do infants begin to understand verbs?
During my PhD, I investigated this question using electroencephalography (EEG) to measure infants’ brain activity (specifically N400 component) while they watched videos of everyday actions, such as waving or walking. These actions were paired with either matching verbs (e.g., “wave!”, “walk!”) or mismatching verbs (e.g., “dance!”, “kiss!”).
We focused on collecting this data in 10-month-olds, but why? Well, theorists such as Gentner (1982) and Golinkoff and colleagues (2002) suggest that infants rely on several cognitive pre-requisites to learn verbs; segmenting verbs from speech, parsing actions from continuous motion, forming action categories, and the ability to map verbs to actions. Reviewing this literature, we found evidence that many of these abilities are in place by ~10 months.
And indeed, we found that by just 10 months of age, infants detected when an action had been labelled incorrectly, providing the earliest evidence to date that infants understand the meanings of verbs.
Read more about this study
Electrophysiological evidence of infants’ understanding of verbs
When do infants first begin grasping the meaning of verbs? To learn verbs – words that describe actions and events – theorists suggest that infants must employ word segmentation, event processing, and verb-to-action mapping skills. Prior research suggests that many of these skills emerge by approximately 10 months…
Is verb learning tied to infants’ motor development?
In another of my PhD studies, I investigated whether infants’ own motor experience with actions is linked to their word knowledge, and specifically whether this stronger for verbs than nouns. Why look at motor skills specifically? As verbs describe actions, which are fleeting and often abstract, I reasoned that infants’ own experience of doing these actions might provide help them narrow down a verb meaning. For example, we know that caregivers frequently say verbs that describe the actions babies are engaged to in the moment (West et al., 2022, 2023) and that infants’ first verbs often describe bodily actions (Huttenlocher et al., 1983; Maouene et al., 2008, 2011).
Here, I asked parents of infants aged 6 to 24 months to report the gross and fine motor actions their baby can do, and which words they already understand. I found that infants’ verb comprehension was strongly associated with their motor development – more so than their noun comprehension was – even after accounting for age. This suggests that infants may draw on their own bodily experience, such as reaching, crawling, waving, to help work out the meaning of new verbs, offering a possible route to understanding these harder-to-learn words. But we need more research to directly explore whether infants’ best learn verbs when they describe actions they can do.
Read more about this study
Parent-Reported Relations Between Vocabulary and Motor Development in Infancy: Differences Between Verbs and Nouns
During early development, increases in vocabulary are related to gains in motor ability, above and beyond the effects of maturation alone. However, little is known about the association between motor development and children’s early acquisition of different types of words…
Funding
This work was funded by my ESRC Wales Doctoral Training Partnership Open-Call PhD Studentship, Grant number: ES/P00069X/1, Reference: 2158637.
Related References
Bergelson, E., & Swingley, D. (2012). At 6-9 months, human infants know the meanings of many common nouns. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(9), 3253–3258. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1113380109
Gentner, D. (1982). Why Nouns Are Learned before Verbs: Linguistic Relativity Versus Natural Partitioning. Technical Report No. 257.
Golinkoff, R. M., Chung, H. L., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Liu, J., Bertenthal, B. I., Brand, R., Maguire, M. J., & Hennon, E. (2002). Young children can extend motion verbs to point-light displays. Developmental Psychology, 38(4), 604–614. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.38.4.604
Huttenlocher, J., Smiley, P., & Charney, R. (1983). Emergence of action categories in the child: Evidence from verb meanings. Psychological Review, 90(1), 72–93. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.90.1.72
Junge, C., Boumeester, M., Mills, D. L., Paul, M., & Cosper, S. H. (2021). Development of the N400 for Word Learning in the First 2 Years of Life: A Systematic Review. Frontiers in Psychology, 12(June). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.689534
Maouene, J., Hidaka, S., & Smith, L. B. (2008). Body parts and early-learned verbs. Cognitive Science, 32(7), 1200–1216. https://doi.org/10.1080/03640210802019997
Maouene, J., Sethuraman, N., Laakso, A., & Maouene, M. (2011). The body region correlates of concrete and abstract verbs. Cognition, Brain, Behavior. An Interdisciplinary Journal, XV(4), 449–484.
Parise, E., & Csibra, G. (2012). Electrophysiological Evidence for the Understanding of Maternal Speech by 9-Month-Old Infants. Psychological Science, 23(7), 728–733. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612438734
West, K. L., Fletcher, K. K., Adolph, K. E., & Tamis-LeMonda, C. S. (2022). Mothers talk about infants’ actions: How verbs correspond to infants’ real-time behavior. Developmental Psychology, 58(3), 405–416. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001285
West, K. L., Saleh, A. N., Adolph, K. E., & Tamis‐LeMonda, C. S. (2023). “Go, go, go!” Mothers’ verbs align with infants’ locomotion. Developmental Science, 26(6). https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13397