Hiromichi Hagihara from the International Research Center for Neurointelligence (WPI-IRCN), The University of Tokyo Institutes for Advanced Study will be giving a talk titled The link between early meanings of object words and object-specific actions in toddlerhood development (abstract below).

Abstract:

Nouns referring to objects are dominant in young children’s vocabulary compared with verbs referring to actions. However, some researchers have argued that early object-words mean undifferentiated concepts in which both objects and their specific actions are fused (e.g., Werner & Kaplan, 1963). In this talk, I will present our work that experimentally investigated this theoretical hypothesis. Both the cross-sectional and longitudinal results showed that, unlike older toddlers, younger ones failed to understand object-word referents correctly when objects and object-specific actions were presented separately (e.g., "doing a meaningless action with shoes"), while both toddlers succeeded in understanding them when both objects and actions were matched (e.g., "putting shoes on"). This result suggested that early object-word meanings constitute the undifferentiated concepts of both objects and actions, and they subsequently differentiate into specific object categories independent of actions. I will also present ongoing related topics we have been working on. Our work will elucidate the uniqueness of young children’s lexical development.

Organised by: Marta Wesierska

Email for teams link: marta.wesierska@warwick.ac.uk

Forthcoming talks:

15-6-22 Jiahao Yang