Action Meets Word How Children Learn Verbs [Hardcover]

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.


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
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