[Source:  Science Daily]
Language acquisition has traditionally been considered a social, interactive process, however new research from Boston University College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences: Sargent College reveals that toddlers are able to acquire the meanings of words even in “socially impoverished contexts” where social or visual information is absent.
Sudha Arunachalam, Ph.D., director of the BU Child Language Lab and assistant professor in the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences at Sargent College authored the study which provides new evidence that just overhearing words may be enough for children to learn them.
This study builds upon previous research from Arunachalam demonstrating that by age two, toddlers can extract information about a new verb from its syntactic context, even before viewing a relevant event. These new findings show that children can do so even in an impoverished social context, without discourse context or visual access to the speakers.
“The only information provided was linguistic,” said Arunachalam. “Our goal was to determine whether 2-year-olds, on hearing new verbs in informative sentences, could use their syntactic content alone to map the novel verbs to meaning, even though no social or visual information was available.”
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