Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When infants hear sentences containing unfamiliar words, are some language-world links (such as noun-object)more readily formed than others (verb-predicate)? What if the context renders verb-predicate and noun-object interpretationsequally plausible? We examined 14-15-month-olds’ capacity for linking semantic elements of scenes with simple bisyllabicnonce utterances. Each syllable either referred to the object, or the object’s motion. Infants heard the syllables in either a VS-or SV-consistent order. Learning was tested using 2AFC language-guided looking. Infants learned the nouns and verbs equallywell, showing no bias favoring nouns. In all conditions, infants learned the meaning of the utterance-final syllable, but not theinitial one, suggesting that noun or verb biases played a smaller role than utterance position when noun- and verb-learning wereequally supported by context.