Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Children learning verbs benefit from seeing multiple events. Study 1 asks whether children can learn verbs when irrelevantevents are present, as is common in everyday contexts. Two- and 3-year-olds saw events in one of three experimentalconditions or one of two control conditions. They successfully extended the verbs only in the experimental conditions.Three-year-olds were more successful than were 2-year-olds, though the younger children could extend verbs. In Study 2,children saw similar events while an eye tracker tracked visual attention to events. Over trials, children looked longer atrelevant than irrelevant events, and maintained their looking to relevant events while increasing their looking to distractorevents. Two-year-olds performed at chance, but 3-year-olds extended the verbs. Together, these results show children canignore irrelevant events and extend new verbs by 3 years. Results reveal mechanisms for learning in everyday contextswhen verbs are heard in varied situations over time.