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Preschool Children’S Processing Of Events During Verb Learning: Is The Focus On People (Faces) Or Their Actions (Hands)?, Jane B. Childers, Emily Grace Warkentin, Blaire M. Porter, Marissa Young, Sneh Lalani, Akila Gopalkrishnan

Psychology Faculty Research

Verbs are central to the syntactic structure of sentences, and, thus, important for learning one’s native language. This study examined how children visually inspect events as they hear, and do not hear, a new verb. Specifically, there is evidence that children may focus on the agent of the action or may prioritize attention to the action being performed; to date, little evidence is available. This study used an eye tracker to track 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds’ looking to the agent (i.e., face) vs. action (i.e., hands) while viewing events linked to a new verb as well as distractor events. A …