New brain imaging research reveals that by 10 months old, infants are already beginning to understand verbs, before they even say their first words.
In the first study to directly test infants' understanding of verbs using neurophysiological techniques, scientists from the University of East Anglia, Cardiff University and the University of Warwick, measured brain rhythms to visualise babies' comprehension of verbs.
Dr Kelsey Frewin, PhD researcher at Cardiff University, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of East Anglia, said: "Around their first birthday, infants begin saying their first words. For many infants, these words will describe caregivers – such as Mama – or other important family members – such as dog - or prominent objects that feature frequently in their daily lives.
"Children's vocabularies continue to feature nouns heavily during early development despite language input from caregivers frequently incorporating other word types, such as verbs."
Learning the meaning of verbs is a complex task for babies, requiring them to segment verbs from speech, parse actions from motion, form action categories, and map verbs onto emerging action concepts. We wanted to further our understanding of when this happens in development.
The scientists used an electroencephalogram (EEG) - a baby-friendly test that records the brain's electrical rhythms using small sensors inside a stretchy cap – to capture word understanding from infants' brain rhythms.
While sitting on their parents' lap, 10-month-old infants watched videos of actions, paired either with a verb that was matched or mismatched to the action.
The researchers showed by that by 10 months, infants were sensitive to mismatches between actions and verbs - suggesting that babies are already beginning to understand several common verbs, before they've typically even begun saying their first words.
The researchers also consider that these findings could alternatively represent babies developing a sensitivity to co-occurrences between actions and verbs, which may serve as a precursor to later verb understanding. Future research will be necessary to understand better the nature of infant responses to action-verb mismatches.
Our findings suggest that 10-month-olds can detect action-verb mismatches. But so far, other research exploring the mechanisms that support verb understanding has mostly been conducted with much older infants and children, and so further investigation is needed to understand the processes that support this emerging verb understanding in the first year of life.
The research, Electrophysiological evidence of infants' understanding of verbs, was published in Cortex.
