Action Meets Word How Children Learn Verbs

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.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek is Stanley and Deborah Lefkowitz Professor of Psychology and Director of the Infant Language Laboratory at Temple University.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff is H. Rodney Sharp Professor in the School of Education and Departments of Psychology and Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Delaware

I. Prerequisites to verb learning: Finding the verb
1. Finding the verbs: Distributional cues available to young learners , Toby Mintz
2. Finding verb forms within the continuous speech stream, Thierry Nazzi & Derek Houston
3. Discovering verbs through multiple-cue integration, Morten H. Christiansen & Padraic Monaghan

II. Prequisites to verb learning: Finding actions in events
4. Actions organize the infant's world, Jean Mandler
5. Conceptual foundations for verb learning: Celebrating the event, Rachel Pulverman, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Roberta M. Golinkoff, Shannon Pruden, & Sara J. Salkind
6. Precursors to verb learning: Infants' understanding of motion events, Marianella Cassassola, Jui Bhagwat & Kim T. Ferguson
7. Preverbal spatial cognition and language-specific input: Categories of containment and support, Soonja Choi
8. The roots of verbs: Prelinguistic action knowledge, Jennifer Sootsman Buresh, Amanda Woodward, & Camille Brune
9. When is a grasp a grasp?, Jeffrey Loucks & Dare Baldwin
10. Word, intention, and action: A two-tiered model of action word learning, Diane Poulin-Dubois & James Forbes
11. Verbs, actions, and intentions, Douglas A. Behrend & Jason M. Scofield

III. When action meets word: Children learn their first verbs
12. Are nouns easier to learn than verbs? Three experimental studies, Jane B. Childers & Michael Tomasello
13. Verbs at the beginning: Parallels between comprehension and input, Letitia Naigles & Erika Hoff
14. A unified theory of word learning: Putting verb acquisition in context, Mandy Maguire, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek & Roberta Golinkoff
15. Who's the subject? Sentence structure and verb meaning, Cynthia Fisher & Hyun-joo Song

IV. How language influences verb learning: Cross-linguistic evidence
16. Verb-learning as a probe into children's grammars, Jeff Lidz
17. 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 Shigematsu
18. But are they really verbs?: Chinese words for action, Twila Tardif
19. Influences of object knowledge on the acquisition of verbs in English and Japanese, Alan W. Kersten, Linda B. Smith, & Hanako Yoshida
20. East and west: A role for culture in the acquisition of nouns and verbs , Tracy Lavin & D. Geoffrey Hall, & Sandra R. Waxman
21. Why verbs are hard to learn , Dedre Gentner

V. What have we learned about verb learning?
22. Lila Gleitman