Action Meets Word

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.

Readership: Developmental and cognitive psychologists, education scholars

Kathryn A. Hirsh-Pasek, Professor of Psychology, Temple University, USA, and Roberta M. Golinkoff, Rodney Sharp Professor, School of Education, University of Delaware, USA

"...an impressive compilation of up-to-the-minutes ideas, research and theories from the leading thinkers in the field of verb acquisition research...an essential handbook for all researchers and post-graduate students...[and] those taking undergraduate or A-level courses." - Psychology Teaching Review

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: Introduction: Progress on the Verb Learning Front
Part I Prerequisites to Verb Learning: Finding the Verb
1: Toby H. Mintz: Finding the Verbs: Distributional Cues Available to Young Learners
2: Thierry Nazzi and Derek Houston: Finding Verb Dorms Within the Continuous Speech Stream
3: Morten H. Christiansen and Padraic Monaghan: Discovering Verbs Through Multiple-Cue Integration
Part II Prerequisites to Verb Learning: Finding Actions in Events
4: Jean M. Mandler: Actions Organize the Infant's World
5: Rachel Pulverman, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Roberta M. Golinkoff, Shannon Pruden, and Sara J. Salkind: Conceptual Foundations for Verb Learning: Celebrating the Event
6: Marianella Cassassola, Jui Bhagwat and Kim T. Ferguson: Precursors to Verb Learning: Infants' Understanding of Motion Events
7: Soonja Choi: Preverbal Spatial Cognition and Language-Specific Input: Categories of Containment and Support
8: Jennifer Sootsman Buresh, Amanda Woodward, and Camille Brune: The Roots of Verbs in Prelinguistic Action Knowledge
9: Jeffrey T. Loucks and Dare Baldwin: When Is a Grasp a Grasp? Characterizing Some Basic Components of Human Action Processing
10: Diane Poulin-Dubois and James Forbes: Word, Intention, and Action: A Two-Tiered Model of Action Word Learning
11: Douglas A. Behrend and Jason M. Scofield: Verbs, Actions, and Intentions
Part III When Action Meets Word: Children Learn Their First Verbs
12: Jane B. Childers and Michael Tomasello: Are Nouns Easier to Learn Than Verbs? Three Experimental Studies
13: Letitia Naigles and Erika Hoff: Verbs at the Very Beginning: Parallels Between Comprehension and Input
14: Mandy Maguire, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff: A Unified Theory of Word Learning: Putting Verb Acquisition in Context
15: Cynthia Fisher and Hyun-joo Song: Who's the Subject? Sentence Structure and Verb Meaning
Part VI How Language Influences Verb Learning: Cross-Linguistic Evidence
16: Jeff Lidz: Verb Learning as a Probe Into Children's Grammars
17: Mutsumi Imai, Etsuko Haryo, Hiroyuki Okada, Li Lianjing, and Jun Shigematsu: Revisiting the Noun-Verb Debate: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison of Novel Noun and Verb Learning in English-, Japanese- and Chinese-Speaking Children
18: Twila Tardif: But Are They Really Verbs?: Chinese Words for Action
19: Alan W. Kersten, Linda B. Smith, and Hanako Yoshida: Influences of Object Knowledge on the Acquisition of Verbs in English and Japanese
20: Tracy Lavin, D. Geoffrey Hall, and Sandra R. Waxman: East and West: A Role for Culture in the Acquisition of Nouns and Verbs
21: Dedre Gentner: Why Verbs are Hard to Learn