Verbs serve as the architectural centerpiece of sentences, making verb learning pivotal for language acquisition. Verb learning requires both the formation of a verb-action mapping and the abstraction of relations between an object and its action. Two competing positions have been proposed to explain the process of verb learning: (a) seeing a…

Infants appear to progress from universal to language-specific event perception. In Japanese, two different verbs describe a person crossing a "bounded ground" (e.g., street) versus an unbounded ground (e.g., field) while in English, the same verb -- "crossing" -- describes both events. Interestingly, Japanese "and"…

Purpose: We examined receptive verb knowledge in 22- to 24-month-old toddlers with a dynamic video eye-tracking test. The primary goal of the study was to examine the utility of eye-gaze measures that are commonly used to study noun knowledge for studying verb knowledge. Method: Forty typically developing toddlers participated. They viewed 2…

Purpose: We examined receptive verb knowledge in 22- to 24-month-old toddlers with a dynamic video eye-tracking test. The primary goal of the study was to examine the utility of eye-gaze measures that are commonly used to study noun knowledge for studying verb knowledge. Method: Forty typically developing toddlers participated. They viewed 2…

The syntactic structure of sentences in which a new word appears may provide listeners with cues to that new word's form class. In English, for example, a noun tends to follow a determiner ("a"/"an"/"the"), while a verb precedes the morphological inflection [ing]. The presence of these markers may assist children in…

Language learning takes place in the context of social interactions, yet the mechanisms that render social interactions useful for learning language remain unclear. This study focuses on whether social contingency might support word learning. Toddlers aged 24-30 months (N = 36) were exposed to novel verbs in one of three conditions: live…

Although research suggests that responsive interactions are imperative for language development, the advent of mobile technology means that parent-child exchanges are often fraught with unpredictable interruptions. Less clear is how these momentary breaks in responsiveness affect word learning. In this within-subjects design, 38 mothers taught…

Well-developed lexical representations are important for reading comprehension, but there have been no prior attempts to track growth in the depth of knowledge of particular words. This article examines increases in depth of vocabulary knowledge in 4-5-year-old preschool students (n = 240) who participated in a vocabulary intervention that taught…

Learning a language is more than learning its vocabulary and grammar. For example, compared with English, Spanish uses many more path verbs such as "ascender" ("to move upward") and "salir" ("to go out"), and expresses manner of motion optionally. English, in contrast, has many manner verbs (e.g., "run,…

To learn motion verbs, infants must be sensitive to the specific event features lexicalized in their language. One event feature important for the acquisition of English motion verbs is the manner of motion. This article examines when and how infants detect manners of motion across variations in the figure's path. Experiment 1 shows that 13- to…

Nouns are generally easier to learn than verbs (e.g. Bornstein, 2005; Bornstein et al., 2004; Gentner, 1982; Maguire, Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 2006). Yet, verbs appear in children's earliest vocabularies, creating a seeming paradox. This paper examines one hypothesis about the difference between noun and verb acquisition. Perhaps the advantage…

To learn relational terms such as verbs and prepositions, children must first dissect and process dynamic event components. This paper investigates the way in which 8- to 14-month-old English-reared infants notice the event components, "figure" (i.e., the moving entity) and "ground" (i.e., stationary setting), in both dynamic…

Can 6- and 8-year-olds (and adults) comprehend common instrument verbs when extended to novel situations? Participants heard eight unusual extensions of common verbs and were asked to paraphrase the verbs' meanings. Half of the verbs used were "specified instrument" verbs that include the name of the instrument used to perform the action (e.g., a…

Verbs are harder to learn than nouns in English and in many other languages, but are relatively easy to learn in Chinese. This paper evaluates one potential explanation for these findings by examining the construct of imageability, or the ability of a word to produce a mental image. Chinese adults rated the imageability of Chinese words from the…

The world's languages draw on a common set of event components for their verb systems. Yet, these components are differentially distributed across languages. At what age do children begin to use language-specific patterns to narrow possible verb meanings? English-, Japanese-, and Spanish-speaking adults, toddlers, and preschoolers were shown…