gorp

so they were trying to figure out if children use syntactic knowledge to learn new vocabulary, specifically in this case they were researching two year olds. with verbs, some are done to a person ("x hit y") and some only have a doer ("x laughed"), and they wanted to see if these different sentence structures had an effect on how toddlers learn.

they got some grad students, put one in a rabbit costume and one in a duck costume. they had the rabbit repeatedly push the duck into a crouching position using their left hand. at the same time, both the rabbit and the duck were moving their right hands in a repetitive circling motion. they had a bunch of two years olds watch this. with half of the kids, they said "the rabbit is gorping the duck!" and with the other half, they said "the rabbit and duck are gorping!" afterwards, they showed two videos at the same time to the kids, one with the rabbit pushing the duck down but no circling motion, and one with both making the circling motion but no pushing. then they said "where's gorping now? find gorping!" and the kids who had heard the first statement would consistently look towards the video of the pushing motion, while the kids who heard the second statement would consistently look towards the video of the circling motion.

so they were trying to figure out if children use syntactic knowledge to learn new vocabulary, specifically in this case they were researching two year olds. with verbs, some are done to a person ("x hit y") and some only have a doer ("x laughed"), and they wanted to see if these different sentence structures had an effect on how toddlers learn.

they got some grad students, put one in a rabbit costume and one in a duck costume. they had the rabbit repeatedly push the duck into a crouching position using their left hand. at the same time, both the rabbit and the duck were moving their right hands in a repetitive circling motion. they had a bunch of two years olds watch this. with half of the kids, they said "the rabbit is gorping the duck!" and with the other half, they said "the rabbit and duck are gorping!" afterwards, they showed two videos at the same time to the kids, one with the rabbit pushing the duck down but no circling motion, and one with both making the circling motion but no pushing. then they said "where's gorping now? find gorping!" and the kids who had heard the first statement would consistently look towards the video of the pushing motion, while the kids who heard the second statement would consistently look towards the video of the circling motion.