Development of the verb-event link between 14 and 18 months

We investigate English-learning infants’ early understanding of the link between the grammatical category verb and the conceptual category event, and their ability to recruit morphosyntactic information online to learn novel verb meanings. We report two experiments using HabituationSwitch Paradigm. In Exp.1, we habituated 14- and 18-montholds with two scenes each paired with a sentence containing a novel verb; at test, we found dishabituation in both age groups when the scene-sentence pairings got switched. This finding was consistent with two explanations: a. infants were able to link verbs to event concepts, and b. infants were simply tracking the surface-level mapping between scenes and sentences. In Exp.2, we investigated these two possibilities, and found that 14-montholds were sensitive to any mismatch, whereas 18-month-olds dishabituated only to a mismatch that involved a meaning change. These results suggest that the verb-event link may be in place as early as 18 months for English-learning infants.