Description
Although there has been a surge in our understanding of children's vocabulary growth, theories of word learning lack a primary focus on verbs and adjectives. Researchers throughout the world recognize how our understanding of language acquisition can be at best partial if we cannot comprehend how verbs are learned. This volume represents a proliferation of research on the frontier of early verb learning, enhancing our understanding of the building blocks of language and considering new ways to assess key aspects of language growth.
Table of Contents
I. Prerequisites to verb learning: Finding the verb1. Finding the verbs: Distributional cues available to young learners , Toby Mintz2. Finding verb forms within the continuous speech stream, Thierry Nazzi & Derek Houston3. Discovering verbs through multiple-cue integration, Morten H. Christiansen & Padraic MonaghanII. Prequisites to verb learning: Finding actions in events4. Actions organize the infant's world, Jean Mandler5. Conceptual foundations for verb learning: Celebrating the event, Rachel Pulverman, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Roberta M. Golinkoff, Shannon Pruden, & Sara J. Salkind6. Precursors to verb learning: Infants' understanding of motion events, Marianella Cassassola, Jui Bhagwat & Kim T. Ferguson7. Preverbal spatial cognition and language-specific input: Categories of containment and support, Soonja Choi8. The roots of verbs: Prelinguistic action knowledge, Jennifer Sootsman Buresh, Amanda Woodward, & Camille Brune9. When is a grasp a grasp?, Jeffrey Loucks & Dare Baldwin10. Word, intention, and action: A two-tiered model of action word learning, Diane Poulin-Dubois & James Forbes11. Verbs, actions, and intentions, Douglas A. Behrend & Jason M. ScofieldIII. When action meets word: Children learn their first verbs12. Are nouns easier to learn than verbs? Three experimental studies, Jane B. Childers & Michael Tomasello13. Verbs at the beginning: Parallels between comprehension and input, Letitia Naigles & Erika Hoff14. A unified theory of word learning: Putting verb acquisition in context, Mandy Maguire, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek & Roberta Golinkoff15. Who's the subject? Sentence structure and verb meaning, Cynthia Fisher & Hyun-joo SongIV. How language influences verb learning: Cross-linguistic evidence16. Verb-learning as a probe into children's grammars, Jeff Lidz17. Revisiting the noun-verb debate: A crosslinguistic comparison of novel noun and verb learning in English-, Japanese- and Chinese-speaking children, Mutsumi Imai, Etsuko Haryo, Hiroyuki Okada, Li Lianjing, & Jun Shigematsu18. But are they really verbs?: Chinese words for action, Twila Tardif19. Influences of object knowledge on the acquisition of verbs in English and Japanese, Alan W. Kersten, Linda B. Smith, & Hanako Yoshida20. East and west: A role for culture in the acquisition of nouns and verbs , Tracy Lavin & D. Geoffrey Hall, & Sandra R. Waxman21. Why verbs are hard to learn , Dedre GentnerV. What have we learned about verb learning?22. Lila Gleitman
