Do Action with High Transitional Probability help infants learn verbs? Jennifer C. Damonte

1. Do Action with High Transitional Probability help infants learn verbs? Jennifer C. Damonte University of Delaware Anticipated Results MATERIAL AND METHOD METHOD Cont. BACKGROUND RESEARCH QUESTIONS • Habituation: Infants are habituated with 2 pairs of either HTP or LTP action-verb pairs. The habituation criterion is met when looking time across three consecutive trials decreases to 75% of the average looking time across the first three trials. • HTP • LTP • Test Trials: 2 counterbalanced orders of test blocks • Same: Same as above. • Switch: Participants: 18- to 24-month-old infants from English speaking households. Designs: Familiarization Stimuli: Starry Actions Familiarization: 2-minute either Starry Movie or cartoon Starry Movie: Semi-random ordered Starry action sequences embedding actions that are bound by HTP (1.00) and actions that are bound by LTP (.33). Cartoon: A silent cartoon about a mouse and an elephant. • To learn verbs infants first must segment a continuous stream of dynamic actions into smaller units (e.g., running, sitting) that will later be labeled by language. • Infants are sensitive to boundaries in continuous events (Hespos et al., 2010), but the mechanism infants use to segment actions is not well understood. • Segmentation Using Statistical Cues: • Previous research has shown that infants can use statistical cues to segment auditory and visual stimuli. • By 8 months, infants can extract the statistical probabilities of syllabic units (e.g., “badegolate….”) by implicitly computing their transitional probabilities (TPs) only after a 2-minute exposure to a stream of speech (Saffran et al., 1996). • Two-, 5-, and 8-month-old infants can extract patterns using TPs after an exposure to sequences of static geometric shapes (Kirkham et al., 2002). • Seven- to 9-month-old infants can segment dynamic actions (i.e., hand movements) using TPs (Roseberry et al., 2011). • Segmentation and Word Learning • After a chance to segment the stream of synthetic speech,17-month-olds mapped objects to newly segmented syllables that were bound by high TPs (Graf Estes et al., 2007). • Hay et al. (2011) extended using a natural language (Italian) with 17-month-olds and found that auditory segmentation facilitated word learning. • Gap in Literature • Only few studies examined how infants segment dynamic events into the units that verbs will label. • No research has examined the link between statistical learning and verb acquisition. • We predicted that segmenting the sequence of actions during familiarization would allow infants to look longer to the actions paired with a different verb only in the HTP condition. • The results will highlight infants’ ability to segment dynamic visual actions using statistical probability and its influence on the verb learning process. • Furthermore, the results can shed a light on the verb acquisition process in typically developing infants and see where the challenges may lie in learning verbs for infants with language impairment • Can infants segment dynamic actions using transitional probabilities? • Are actions that are bound by high transitional probabilities (HTP) easier for infants to map to a new verb than actions that are bound by low transitional probabilities (LTP)? Correspondence: Jennifer C. Damonte jdamonte@udel.edu