Does the ordering of givenness and newness matter in early word learning?

Does the ordering of givenness and newness matter in early word learning? Caregivers tend to place new information at the end of an utterance in child-directed speech (CDS) in addition to accenting it (Fernald & Mazzie, 1992). However, recent work has shown that young children prefer new-before-given order when syntax is not involved, opposite to adults’ preference for given-before-new order in both adult-direct speech and CDS (Narasimhan & Dimorth 2008). The current study investigates the role of givenness-newness ordering in word learning. Specifically, we investigated whether 24-month-old Dutch children could learn a new word (conveying new information) more successfully when it followed a familiarized word conveying given information) (new-before-given) than the other way around (given-before-new). Two pilot experiments were conducted on noun learning (NL, hereafter; N=5) and verb learning (VL, hereafter; N=4), adapted from Grassmann & Tomasello (2007) Children received two conditions: new-before-given and given-before-new. Each condition had four phases: (1) Familiarization: children were familiarized with a novel noun(VL)/verb(NL), serving as the given information; (2) Teaching: children were taught a novel verb(VL)/noun(NL) in sentences like “De fek bikt nu”and “Nu bikt de dap” (with the target word accented) , in which the order of givenness and newness was manipulated. (3) Neutral language training: children were taught a distractor verb(VL)/noun(NL) without any verbal cues and (4) Testing: It was counted correct if s/he picked up or pointed to the target object in NL or acted out the target action in VL. The correctness and reaction time in testing were measured. Preliminary results suggest that 4 children learned the noun in the new-before-given condition but 3 in the other condition in NL. The reaction time in new-before-given (M=2.24s) was shorter than the other (M=4.8s). These results suggested that new-before-given may facilitate noun learning. However, only one child succeeded in the verb learning, which might result from the difficulty in verb learning or the act-out task. (300 words) References Fernald, A., & Mazzi, C. (1991). Prosody and focus in speech to infants and adults. Developmental Psychology, 27, 209-221. Grassmann, S., Tomasello, M., 2007. Two-year-olds use primary sentence accent to learn new words. Journal of Child Language 34, 677–687 Narasimhan, B., & Dimroth, C. (2008). Word order and information status in child language. Cognition, 107, 317-329.