Action Meets Word: How Children Learn Verbs

✍ Scribed by Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff

• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 606
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Words are the building blocks of language. An understanding of how words are learned is thus central to any theory of language acquisition. Although there has been a surge in our understanding of children's vocabulary growth, theories of word learning focus primarily on object nouns. Word learning theories must explain not only the learning of object nouns, but also the learning of other, major classes of words - verbs and adjectives. Verbs form the hub of the sentence because they determine the sentence's argument structure. 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 enters the relatively uncharted waters of early verb learning, focusing on the universal, conceptual foundations for verb learning, and how these foundations intersect with the burgeoning language system.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents......Page 11
Contributors......Page 15
Introduction: Progress on the Verb Learning Front......Page 21
Part I: Prerequisites to Verb Learning: Finding the Verb......Page 47
1 Finding the Verbs: Distributional Cues to Categories Available to Young Learners......Page 49
2 Finding Verb Forms Within the Continuous Speech Stream......Page 82
3 Discovering Verbs Through Multiple-Cue Integration......Page 106
Part II: Prerequisites to Verb Learning: Finding Actions in Events......Page 127
4 Actions Organize the Infant’s World......Page 129
5 Conceptual Foundations for Verb Learning: Celebrating the Event......Page 152
6 Precursors to Verb Learning: Infants’ Understanding of Motion Events......Page 178
7 Preverbal Spatial Cognition and Language-Specific Input: Categories of Containment and Support......Page 209
8 The Roots of Verbs in Prelinguistic Action Knowledge......Page 226
9 When Is a Grasp a Grasp? Characterizing Some Basic Components of Human Action Processing......Page 246
10 Word, Intention, and Action: A Two-Tiered Model of Action Word Learning......Page 280
11 Verbs, Actions, and Intentions......Page 304
Part III: When Action Meets Word: Children Learn Their First Verbs......Page 327
12 Are Nouns Easier to Learn Than Verbs? Three Experimental Studies......Page 329
13 Verbs at the Very Beginning: Parallels Between Comprehension and Input......Page 354
14 A Unified Theory of Word Learning: Putting Verb Acquisition in Context......Page 382
15 Who’s the Subject? Sentence Structure and Verb Meaning......Page 410
Part IV: How Language Influences Verb Learning: Cross-Linguistic Evidence......Page 445
16 Verb Learning as a Probe Into Children’s Grammars......Page 447
17 Revisiting the Noun-Verb Debate: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison of Novel Noun and Verb Learning in English-, Japanese-, and Chinese-Speaking Children......Page 468
18 But Are They Really Verbs? Chinese Words for Action......Page 495
19 Influences of Object Knowledge on the Acquisition of Verbs in English and Japanese......Page 517
20 East and West: A Role for Culture in the Acquisition of Nouns and Verbs......Page 543
21 Why Verbs Are Hard to Learn......Page 562
B......Page 583
C......Page 584
D......Page 585
G......Page 586
H......Page 587
K......Page 588
M......Page 589
O......Page 590
S......Page 591
W......Page 593
Z......Page 594
A......Page 595
C......Page 596
D......Page 597
F......Page 598
K......Page 599
M......Page 600
N......Page 601
P......Page 602
S......Page 603
W......Page 605

✦ Subjects

Психологические дисциплины;Психология личности;Социализация личности;