<p>Study author Caroline Rowland was quoted by LiveScience as saying: “Recent research suggests that even at 21 months, infants are sensitive to the different meanings produced by particular grammatical construction, even if they can’t articulate words properly.”<br /><br />For their study, Rowland and her colleagues showed a group of two-year-olds pictures of a cartoon rabbit and duck and asked each toddler to match the illustrations to sentences containing made-up verbs.<br /><br />“One picture was the rabbit acting on the duck, lifting the duck’s leg, and the other was an image of the animals acting independently, such as swinging a leg,” Rowland said.<br /><br />“We then played sentences with made-up verbs — the rabbit is glorping the duck — over a loudspeaker and asked them to point to the correct picture. They picked out the correct image more often than we would expect them to by chance.”<br /></p>
<p>Study author Caroline Rowland was quoted by LiveScience as saying: “Recent research suggests that even at 21 months, infants are sensitive to the different meanings produced by particular grammatical construction, even if they can’t articulate words properly.”<br /><br />For their study, Rowland and her colleagues showed a group of two-year-olds pictures of a cartoon rabbit and duck and asked each toddler to match the illustrations to sentences containing made-up verbs.<br /><br />“One picture was the rabbit acting on the duck, lifting the duck’s leg, and the other was an image of the animals acting independently, such as swinging a leg,” Rowland said.<br /><br />“We then played sentences with made-up verbs — the rabbit is glorping the duck — over a loudspeaker and asked them to point to the correct picture. They picked out the correct image more often than we would expect them to by chance.”<br /></p>