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Joshua Tabaldo
Psychology

Dare Baldwin, Mentor
Eric Olofson, Mentor

Children’s Use of Intentionality
Cues in Verb Learning

Trying to discern how children solve the problem of learning language has tended to focus on nouns, with only a few studies (Carpenter, Akhtar, & Tomasello, 1998) discussing the acquisition of verbs. Noun learning can be largely attributed to the whole-object and the mutual exclusivity assumptions (Markman, 1985), but a hypothesized tool for verb acquisition uses intentionality cues, for which one assumes that novel verbs refer to intentional actions. To test this hypothesis, we presented children (18-30 month-olds) with a dual display of action videos, one being accidental and the other intentional. The action streams were identical. The dual videos differed only in the object being manipulated and contextual information that distinguished which action was categorized as intentional or accidental. By asking children to choose the video that portrays the novel verb, we can interpret the child’s use of intentionality cues. To support our hypothesis, children would point to the intentional video, while pointing to the accidental videos would dispute it.