Author: Rosie Mejia

This study is looking at how children of this age learn the meanings of new verbs (action words). We play videos with people using made-up verbs, and then show a puppet performing different actions with a toy. We record where children are looking during these videos to see which action they think is a better fit to the verb that they just heard. We measure where they’re looking on the screen to see which video they pay attention to more, which tells us what they think the new verb is likely to mean. This helps us understand how children at this age create expectations about what verbs mean based on the structure of sentences that they hear.