How much information is too much when introducing new verbs: Insights from typically-developing 3-year-olds

The linguistic contexts in which verbs appear provide useful information about their meanings. We examined how much information in the subject determiner phrase (DP) is most supportive for learning a novel verb downstream. A preferential-pointing task with typically-developing 3-year-olds showed the following: a) children successfully learned novel verbs presented with light subjects (e.g., ‘the girl was pilking’), but not with heavy subjects (e.g., ‘the nice tall girl was pilking’); and b) the difficulty with heavy subjects seems to come from the processing load imposed by the modified DP, rather than its pragmatic (over)informativeness. These results shed light on what constitutes an optimal linguistic context for verb learning. Young children, whose processing capacity is limited, may benefit more from shorter sentences.