Action Meets Word: How Children Learn Verbs

Introduction: Progress on the Verb Learning Front PART I PREREQUISITES TO VERB LEARNING: FINDING THE VERB 1. Finding the Verbs: Distributional Cues Available to Young Learners 2. Finding Verb Dorms Within the Continuous Speech Stream 3. Discovering Verbs Through Multiple-Cue Integration PART II PREREQUISITES TO VERB LEARNING: FINDING ACTIONS IN EVENTS 4. Actions Organize the Infant's World 5. Conceptual Foundations for Verb Learning: Celebrating the Event 6. Precursors to Verb Learning: Infants' Understanding of Motion Events 7. Preverbal Spatial Cognition and Language-Specific Input: Categories of Containment and Support 8. The Roots of Verbs in Prelinguistic Action Knowledge 9. When Is a Grasp a Grasp? Characterizing Some Basic Components of Human Action Processing 10. Word, Intention, and Action: A Two-Tiered Model of Action Word Learning 11. Verbs, Actions, and Intentions PART III WHEN ACTION MEETS WORD: CHILDREN LEARN THEIR FIRST VERBS 12. Are Nouns Easier to Learn Than Verbs? Three Experimental Studies 13. Verbs at the Very Beginning: Parallels Between Comprehension and Input 14. A Unified Theory of Word Learning: Putting Verb Acquisition in Context 15. Who's the Subject? Sentence Structure and Verb Meaning PART VI HOW LANGUAGE INFLUENCES VERB LEARNING: CROSS-LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE 16. Verb Learning as a Probe Into Children's Grammars 17. Revisiting the Noun-Verb Debate: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison of Novel Noun and Verb Learning in English-, Japanese- and Chinese-Speaking Children 18. But Are They Really Verbs?: Chinese Words for Action 19. Influences of Object Knowledge on the Acquisition of Verbs in English and Japanese 20. East and West: A Role for Culture in the Acquisition of Nouns and Verbs 21. Why Verbs are Hard to Learn