topics: |  cognitive-linguistics | language-acquisition | verb

Verbs are the architectural centerpiece of grammar, determining the argument structure of a sentence.Verbs can be defined syntactically or semantically. Syntactically, a verb is a word that takes a subject (or agent) or an object or both.Verbs, for example, can take different morphological forms based on gender, person, number, animacy, and indefiniteness, and they can be passivized or dativized in many languages. Semantically, verbs are words that “encode events: A cover term for states or conditions of existenceprocesses or unfoldingsand actions or executive processes” (Frawley, 1992, p. 141). A verb is a description of a relation that occurs over time.

In general, however, the first relational terms are verbs and the first verbs are motion verbs.

[There exists a debate on whether children have the syntactic category of verb (see [Pinker, 1984]) or whether they simply have the category of action word (see [Olguin & Tomasello, 1993]).]

[Gentner 1982] posits that verbs pose special challenges for word learners. Verbs label events that are comprised of components like manner (walk vs. swagger), instrument (hammer, shovel), path (ascend, descend ), and result (open, break) — any of which can be the dominant focus for the label [Talmy 1985]. Further, across languages, different components are highlighted such that manner is often conflated in English verbs (e.g., skip), while path is often an integral part of Spanish verbs (e.g., ascendere; see [Slobin 2001], or [Talmy 2000], for reviews).

Verbs also describe events in the world and events are by nature more ephemeral than the objects that nouns tend to label ([Langacker 1987]; [Slobin 2001]). Furthermore, in speech to children, verbs often label these events even before the action has taken place (Tomasello & Kruger, 1992), while nouns tend to label enduring entities available for prolonged inspection. Another difference between nouns and verbs is that nouns have a tendency to have more restricted meanings than do verbs. Finally, verbs are inherently relational; the use of a verb implies the presence of an actor to carry out that action.

Jean M. Mandler : Actions organize the infant’s world

p. 111-133

Image-schemas summarize spatial relations and movements in space.  Note that
they are not visual images (although they may be used in image
construction).  They are a bit like topological representations, in that they
omit many details that we see and that would appear in an image, such as
shape and path direction, leaving behind only an irreducible meaning, such as
path itself.
Image-schemas are a format for storing accessible meanings and cannot
themselves be brought to awareness.

From early on, infants attend to beginning and endings of object paths.
e.g. if a moving object stops before touching another, even if the gap is
very small [Leslie 82; leslie/keeble 1987]
3-months differentiate bilogically correct from incorrect motion of both
people and animals [Arterberry/Bornstein 2001] [Bertenthal 1993]
This discrimination may originally be a kind of automatic perceptual
schematizing, but at some point through attentive processing it forms a
conceptual package associated w self-motion.

9-mo olds distressed on seeing a mechanical robot start to move on its own
[Poulin-Dubois, Lepage, Ferland 1996]
  --> violation of expectations abt inanim behaviour

[Spelke Philips 1995]
7-mo : look longer at inanim objects that self-start

Evidence that inanim / anim distinction may be based on motion rather than
any shape / appearance attribute.

5- to 9-mo olds attention is focused on end-point or goal of a reach. By 9
months, infants differentiate between intentionally grasping an object vs
accidentally dropping a hand on it.
[Woodward:1998, 1999]

10-11-mo olds - learned something abt structures of actions.  videos in which
everyday actions were interrupted/suspended in the middle or end were looked
at longer.
[Baldwin, Baird Saylor Clark 2001]

***IDEA for expt
[Gergely Csibra etal - 1999, 1995]
use computer displays showing geom forms moving around and interacting in
various ways.  by end of 1st yr, infants clearly distinguish goal-directed
paths from unmotivated trajectories.
Displays consist of moving circles, so there was no figural info at all.

[Johnson Sockaci 2000]
14-mo olds treat purple blobs as agents if they engage in goal-directed
activity.

[Johnson Slaughter Carey 1998]
when amorphous object has face w eyes or had no face but acted contingently w
infants, if it turned towards an object, 12-mo olds would follow its "gaze"

Arterberry, M. E., & Bornstein, M. H. (2001). Three-month-old infants’
  categorization of animals and vehicles based on static and dynamic
  attributes. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 80, 333–346.
Baldwin,D. A., Baird, J. A., Saylor,M. M., & Clark, M.A. (2001). Infants
  parse dynamic action. Child Development, 72, 708–717.
Bertenthal, B. (1993). Infants’ perception of biomechanical motions:
  Intrinsic image and knowledge-based constraints. In C. Granrud (Ed.),
  Visual perception and cognition in infancy. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Csibra, G., Gergely, G., Bíró, S., Koós, O., & Brockbank, M. (1999). Goal
  attribution without agency cues: The perception of “pure reason” in
  infancy. Cognition, 72, 237–267.
Gentner, D. (1982). Why nouns are learned before verbs: Linguistic relativity
 versus natural partitioning. In S. Kuczaj (Ed.), Language development:
 Vol. 2. Language, thought, and culture (pp. 301–334). Hillsdale, NJ:
 Erlbaum.
Gergely, G., Nádasdy, Z., Csibra, G., & Bíró, S. (1995). Taking the
 intentional stance at 12 months of age. Cognition, 56, 165–193.
Johnson, S., Slaughter, V., & Carey, S. (1998). Whose gaze will infants
  follow?  The elicitation of gaze-following in 12-month-olds. Developmental
  Science, 1, 233–238.
Johnson, S. C., & Sockaci, E. (2000, July). The categorization of agents from
  actions. Poster presented at the International Conference on Infant
  Studies, Brighton, England.
Leslie,A.M. (1982). The perception of causality in infants. Perception, 11, 173–186.
Leslie, A., & Keeble, S. (1987). Do six-month-old infants perceive causality?
  Cognition, 25, 265–288.
Poulin-Dubois, D., Lepage, A., & Ferland, D. (1996). Infants’ concept of
  animacy. Cognitive Development, 11, 19–36.
Poulin-Dubois, D., & Vyncke, J. (2003). The cow jumped over the moon:
  Infants’ inductive generalization of motion properties. Concordia
  University, Montreal: Unpublished manuscript.
Spelke, E. S., Phillips, A., & Woodward, A. L. (1995). Infants’ knowledge of
  object motion and human action. In A. J. Premack, D. Premack, & D. Sperber,
  (Eds.), Causal cognition (pp. 44–77). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Talmy, L. (1988). Force dynamics in language and cognition. Cognitive
  Science, 12, 49–100.
Woodward, A. L. (1998). Infants selectively encode the goal object of an
  actor’s reach.Cognition, 69, 1–34.
Woodward, A. L. (1999). Infants’ ability to distinguish between purposeful
  and nonpurposeful behaviors. Infant Behavior and Development, 22, 145–160.

Childers, JB and Tomasello, M.: Are nouns easier to learn than verbs?

		      		    (Three experimental studies)

[Gentner 1982] : across several lgs, children's early productive vocabs
appear to be dominated by nouns.

[Gentner/Boroditsky:2001] this is not because "nouns are easy", but because
the conceptual basis for nouns are more likely to be "preindividuated" -
distinguished from others, more likely to have become categories.

Cross-linguistic comparative data:.
English, Italian, Spanish: favour nouns
Mandarin, and perhaps Korean, : do not prefer Ns because Ns are not as
	frequent in the input in these lgs.

Also, children use each of their verbs more frequently than the Ns, so
spontaneous speech samples (e.g. 1hr) tend to underestim Ns.  Better
methodology may be vocab checklist.  In
[Tardif etal 1999]
on Mandarin, the V advantage almost disappeared in the vocab checklist.

Trading Spaces: Carving Up Events for Learning

  author={Goksun, T. and Hirsh-Pasek, K. and Golinkoff, R.M.},
  pages={33--42},

IN (shop cart to kid seat)
monies.IN (looking for coins between cushions)

from
Melissa. M. Bowerman 1999 - Learning to structure space for language: a
   cross-linguistic perspective in Language and space: edited by Paul
   Bloom, M.A.Peterson, Nadel and Garett; 1999, MIT Press

IN.( shop cart to kid-seat)
Monies.IN ( looking for coins dropped b/w cushions)
Books. OUT Books.BACK ( books taken out from and put back into a box)
Monkey.UP ( on seeing monkey ON TV jump onto a couch)
DOWN.Drop ( toy falls off couch )
ON. ( cellotape stuck on chair )
OFF ( pushing mom's hand off her drawing paper)
OPEN mommy ( wants adult to straighten bent "mommy" doll )

spatial conceptual structures is available from about 6 mos old; once lg
comes, how are these mapped

Order of acquisition: In -> On -> Under
why is this the ordering?  is it because of some motivation or urge to
	communicate locational states?

that they forget phonemes not native to the lg is not quite correct

but the forgetting of tight fitting in korean etc is not quite analogical -
there is no perceptual reorganization and loss

japanese: "go" has many manner variants; "go through" is turu, "go under" is
different etc.

---
Abstract

Relational terms (e.g., verbs and prepositions) are the cornerstone of
language development, bringing together two distinct fields: linguistic
theory and infants’ event processing. To acquire relational terms such as
run, walk, in, and on, infants must first perceive and conceptualize
components of dynamic events such as containment–support, path–manner,
source–goal, and figure–ground.  Infants must then uncover how the particular
language they are learning encodes these constructs. This review addresses
the interaction of language learning with infants’ conceptualization of these
nonlinguistic spatial event components. We present the thesis that infants
start with language-general nonlinguistic constructs that are gradually
refined and tuned to the requirements of their native language. In effect,
infants are trading spaces, maintaining their sensitivity to some relational
distinctions while dampening other distinctions, depending on how their
native language expresses these constructs.

---

Infants might learn relational language in a similar fashion (for similar
arguments see also Choi, 2006; Clark, 2003, 2004; Hespos & Spelke,
2007). They might notice a common set of foundational components of events
regardless of the language they are learning. Then, influenced by
distinctions encoded in the native language, they might focus on a subset of
these components that are relevant to their native language.  Analogously,
this phenomenon might be called semantic reorganization, in which universal
perceptual constructs are reorganized to match the expressional tendencies of
one’s native tongue. Language, in this case, would have the function of
orienting infants’ attention to some relations in events over others.

---
The time for action is now. It’s never too late to do something.
	—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in.
	—Charles Dickens
When I was kidnapped, my parents snapped into action. They rented
out my room.
	—Woody Allen

Contents

Introduction: Progress on the Verb Learning Front 3
  Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek

Part I Prerequisites to Verb Learning: Finding the Verb

1 Finding the Verbs: Distributional Cues to Categories Available to Young
  Learners 31
  	Toben H. Mintz
2 Finding Verb Forms Within the Continuous Speech Stream 64
  	Thierry Nazzi and Derek Houston
3 Discovering Verbs Through Multiple-Cue Integration 88
  	Morten H. Christiansen and Padraic Monaghan

Part II Prerequisites to Verb Learning: Finding Actions in Events

4 Actions Organize the Infant’s World 111
  	Jean M. Mandler
5 Conceptual Foundations for Verb Learning: Celebrating the Event 134
  	Rachel Pulverman, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Roberta M. Golinkoff,
  	Shannon Pruden, and Sara J. Salkind
6 Precursors to Verb Learning: Infants’ Understanding of
  Motion Events 160
  	Marianella Casasola, Jui Bhagwat, and Kim T. Ferguson
7 Preverbal Spatial Cognition and Language-Specific Input: Categories of
  Containment and Support 191
  	Soonja Choi
8 The Roots of Verbs in Prelinguistic Action Knowledge 208
  	Jennifer Sootsman Buresh, Amanda Woodward,
  	and Camille W. Brune
9 When Is a Grasp a Grasp? Characterizing Some Basic Components of
  Human Action Processing 228
  	Jeffrey T. Loucks and Dare Baldwin
10 Word, Intention, and Action: A Two-Tiered Model of
   Action Word Learning 262
   	Diane Poulin-Dubois and James N. Forbes
11 Verbs, Actions, and Intentions 286
   	Douglas A. Behrend and Jason Scofield

Part III When Action Meets Word: Children Learn Their First Verbs

12 Are Nouns Easier to Learn Than Verbs? Three Experimental Studies 311
   	Jane B. Childers and Michael Tomasello
13 Verbs at the Very Beginning: Parallels Between
   Comprehension and Input 336
   	Letitia R. Naigles and Erika Hoff
14 A Unified Theory of Word Learning: Putting Verb
   Acquisition in Context 364
   	Mandy J. Maguire, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff
15 Who’s the Subject? Sentence Structure and Verb Meaning 392
   	Cynthia Fisher and Hyun-joo Song

Part IV How Language Influences Verb Learning: Cross-Linguistic Evidence

16 Verb Learning as a Probe Into Children’s Grammars 429
   Jeffrey Lidz
17 Revisiting the Noun-Verb Debate: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison of Novel
   Noun and Verb Learning in English-, Japanese-, and Chinese-Speaking
   Children 450
   	Mutsumi Imai, Etsuko Haryu, Hiroyuki Okada, Li Lianjing,
   	and Jun Shigematsu
18 But Are They Really Verbs? Chinese Words for Action 477
   	Twila Tardif
19 Influences of Object Knowledge on the Acquisition of Verbs in
   English and Japanese 499
   	Alan W. Kersten, Linda B. Smith, and Hanako Yoshida
20 East and West: A Role for Culture in the Acquisition of
   Nouns and Verbs 525
   	Tracy A. Lavin, D. Geoffrey Hall, and Sandra R. Waxman
21 Why Verbs Are Hard to Learn 544
   	Dedre Gentner