When less is more: Evidence from Korean-learning children’s verb acquisition

Linguistic context supports children’s verb learning. For example, upon hearing “the boy is pilking,” children can infer that the novel verb pilk names an action that a boy (rather than a girl) engages in. However, more information, such as a modified subject (e.g. “the tall boy is pilking”), could hinder rather than aid due to increased processing load, as suggested by a previous study with English-learning toddlers (He et al., 2020, Language Learning and Development 16, 22–42). In the current study, we found that Korean-learning preschoolers also experienced difficulty when the verb appeared with a modified subject compared to an unmodified one; this difficulty persisted across three situational contexts, even when the additional information was necessary to identify the referent. Our findings, with a typologically different language and diverse contexts, provide cross-linguistic support for prior results in English, consistent with a conceptual replication of the idea that less information can sometimes be more beneficial for learning.