The Influence of Visual, Auditory, and Linguistic Cues on Children’s Novel Verb Generalization

An influential theory proposes that children learn words by initially relying on perceptual cues to identify referents, only later recruiting social or linguistic cues to acquire new words (Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek 2007). Here we ask whether a similar bias also characterizes children’s extensions of words to novel contexts. In order to establish relative preference for cues in different modalities, we focus on how children recruit auditory, visual, and lexical distributional cues in extending verbs to unfamiliar contexts involving missing or conflicting information regarding the referent of the verb. Four-year olds were taught two nonce verbs and subsequently asked to produce one of the two verbs in novel contexts involving conflicting cues (e.g., the linguistic cue associated with one verb is paired with the visual cue associated with the other verb). To assess relative cue preference, children’s responses in the ‘bimodal conflicting cues’ condition were compared with their responses in a ‘baseline unimodal’ condition in which only one of the three cues was presented. Four-year olds overwhelmingly prefer to produce verbs associated with visual cues versus auditory or linguistic cues. But there is no advantage for auditory over linguistic cues when they are placed in conflict. These findings demonstrate that children weight perceptual cues more heavily than linguistic cues during the process of verb generalization, but only if the cues are visual. The cue-weighting strategies that children recruit during verb generalization are similar in some respects to those proposed for the process of mapping word forms onto referents during word learning and additionally may be driven by visual dominance effects that characterize cognitive processing in other kinds of tasks (Colavita 1974).