Children attend to intrinsic motions when learning nouns

The present research was designed to test whether 3-year-old-English-speaking children preferentially associate novel nouns with intrinsic motion rather than extrinsic motion, as predicted by the theory of Kersten (1998). Intrinsic motion refers to the ways the parts of an object move in relation to one another. In contrast, extrinsic motion refers to the motion of an object as a whole with respect to an external reference point (e.g. another object). In two separate experiments, we demonstrated that nouns are associated with intrinsic motion and verbs are associated with extrinsic motion. Specifically, children were able to detect differences between stimuli paired with novel nouns based on intrinsic motion and stimuli paired with novel verbs based on extrinsic motion. In other words, we shed light on the different motion cues children attend to when learning nouns and verbs. Thus, children utilize motion cues in addition to static characteristics when learning nouns and verbs. Therefore, distinct types of motion information play an important role in the learning of nouns and verbs.