Recent evidence shows that children can use cross-situational statistics to learn new object labels under referential ambiguity (e.g., Smith & Yu, 2008). Such evidence has been interpreted as support for proposals that statistical information about word-referent co-occurrence plays a powerful role in word learning. But object labels represent only…

This study examined children's acquisition of language by means of correlating spoken words and observed objects and actions. The common sense view of word learning via observation applies easily to learning nouns for objects, but becomes problematic in the process of learning verbs. When they encounter novel verbs applied to observed situations,…

Results of 3 sentence-interpretation experiments involving 180 preschoolers suggest that very little explicit syntactic knowledge is needed to give children some structural clues to verb meaning. Sentence structure appears to have a meaning of its own that can be applied by analogy to the child's conceptual representation. (SLD)