English- and Mandarin-speaking infants' discrimination of persons, actions, and objects in a dynamic event without audio inputs

Abstract

English learners typically have vocabularies that are dominated by nouns, whereas naturalistic observations, parental checklists and word mapping experiments reveal that verbs, primarily action words, are acquired early and in large quantities by learners of Mandarin Chinese. However, little research has examined whether English and Mandarin learners' early comprehension and production of nouns and verbs could be attributed to attentional patterns. In this study, we use a habituation paradigm to explore English- and Mandarin-learning infants' abilities to discriminate between Persons, Actions, and Objects presented without accompanying linguistic cues. The results revealed that English- and Mandarin-exposed 6–8 and 17–19 month-old infants showed similar patterns of attention. The younger infants showed significant increases to Person and Action changes only, whereas the older infants showed increased looking times to Person, Action, and Object changes, suggesting that the differential ease of acquiring verbs across languages might be attributed to cultural processes specific to word learning, rather than differences in early attentional preferences across cultures.