When Actions Can't Speak for Themselves: How Might Infant-Directed Speech and Infant-Directed Action Influence Verb Learning?

Imagine Dina, a new mother sitting on the floor with her 1.5-year-old son. She announces her intention to roll a big blue ball, saying, “Look Benjamin … I’m going to roll the ball.” She labels the action as it is in progress and in rough synchrony with the movement of the ball when she says, “Wow, it’s roooollllling!” Benjamin’s mother places the verb roll at the end of the sentence, a beneficial position for parsing it from the speech stream because it is bounded by a pause (Golinkoff & Alioto, 1995). The pause may help Benjamin realize that what he just heard was the end of a unit. Furthermore, he may get some idea that that unit is likely a verb (although Benjamin has no conscious awareness of the category “verb”) by noting that roll ends in an /ing/ (Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, & Schweisguth, 2001). Benjamin may well remember the verb roll in this sentence because it profits from the recency effect by being at the end of the utterance. Without even realizing it, Benjamin’s mother repeats this new verb many more times as they play. She also emphasizes the verb by elongating its vowel, placing stress on the word and uttering it in isolation. Moreover, Benjamin’s mom uses larger-than-life movements, such as throwing her arms out in front of her body in an exaggerated fashion and holding them out there as the ball rolls away from her. Benjamin’s attention is maintained throughout their 5-min ball-rolling game. Although Benjamin is learning several new words per day, he has no action verbs in his productive vocabulary. On this occasion, however, he is being afforded the opportunity to learn the name of an action he is engaged in. How often do young language learners find themselves in similar situations? Do parents typically exaggerate the actions they perform or emphasize the verbs that label those actions acoustically in speech to their children? As we describe, verb learning is not easy. A combination of exaggerated input in what the child sees when an action is performed and in what the child hears when that action is named might assist infants in learning verbs.