Semantics of Verbs and the Development of Verb Inflection in Child Language

Bloom, Lois; Lifter, Karin; Hafitz, Jeremie

doi:10.2307/413762

Cited by 119 publications

(106 citation statements)

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“…In bodi studies, the progressive -ing inflection was used exclusively. Several studies have shown that the progressive ending is used earlier and more frequendy with action verbs, while die past tense ending is more often applied first to result verbs (e.g., Antinucci & Miller, 1976;Bloom, Lifter, & Hafitz, 1980). It is dius possible diat the use of the progressive ending may have contributed to the infrequent use of result verbs as first responses in Study 1, and that requesting labels in a different way (e.g., "What did he do?")…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

The Development of Verb Concepts: Children's Use of Verbs to Label Familiar and Novel Events

Behrend¹

1990

Child Development

122

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The importance of actions, results, and instruments in verb concepts was examined in four studies. Study 1 investigated how children label familiar events for which instrument, action, and result verbs were appropriate labels. In Study 2, subjects were taught novel verbs and were asked to use these verbs to label events in which the instrument, action, or result had been changed. Study 1 showed that 3-year-olds used action verbs more frequently than older children and adults, and that they preferred to use an action verb over a result verb when both verbs were appropriate labels. Instrument verbs were used most frequently as first responses to the events, and were most frequently used by older children and adults. In Study 2, subjects were least likely to use the novel verbs to label events in which the result had changed. This effect increased with age. Action changes had a moderate effect for all age groups, while instrument changes had the weakest effect. Studies 3 and 4 ruled out stimulus salience and a familiar word strategy as interpretations of these findings. The studies are discussed in terms of current theory and research on conceptual development, word-learning strategies, and the semantic organization of nouns and verbs.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

The Development of Verb Concepts: Children's Use of Verbs to Label Familiar and Novel Events

Behrend¹

1990

Child Development

122

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“…Such forms dominate children's early inflections in Hebrew for several months before they begin to add other inflections to their repertoire (Lustigman, 2012(Lustigman, , 2013. We predicted that adult responses, whether reformulations or other types of construal, might also focus initially on infinitival and present tense forms of the verbs children produced, and adults only later present the children with a larger array of verb forms in their responses (see Bloom, Lifter, & Hafitz, 1980).…”

Section: General Predictionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exposure and feedback in language acquisition: adult construals of children's early verb-form use in Hebrew

Lustigman

Clark

2018

J. Child Lang.

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This study focuses on adult responses to children's verb uses, the information they provide, and how they change over time. We analyzed longitudinal samples from four children acquiring Hebrew (age-range: 1;4–2;5; child verb-forms = 8,337). All child verbs were coded for inflectional category, and for whether and how adults responded to them. Our findings show that: (a) children's early verbs were opaque with no clear inflectional target (e.g., the child-form tapes corresponds to letapes ‘to-climb’, metapes ‘is-climbing’, yetapes ‘will-climb’), with inflections added gradually; (b) most early verbs were followed by adult responses using the same lexeme; and (c) as opacity in children's verbs decreased, adults made fewer uses of the same lexeme in their responses, and produced a broader array of inflections and inflectional shifts. In short, adults are attuned to what their children know and respond to their early productions accordingly, with extensive ‘tailor-made’ feedback on their verb uses.

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“…Traditionally, such utterances have been interpreted in terms of the gradual acquisition of the relevant morphemes (L. Bloom, Lifter, & Hafitz, 1980;Brown, 1973), or the dropping of inflections as a result of performance limitations in production (P. Bloom, 1990;Valian, 1991). More recently, however, Wexler (1994Wexler ( , 1998 argued that, rather than reflecting a process of inflection drop, utterances such as those in 1 to 4 reflect children's optional use of nonfinite forms (e.g., "want," "go," "barking," "done") in contexts in which a finite form (e.g., "wants," "went," "is barking," "has done") is obligatory in the adult language.…”

Section: The Oi Phenomenonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling the Development of Children's Use of Optional Infinitives in Dutch and English Using MOSAIC

2006

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In this study we use a computational model of language learning called model of syntax acquisition in children (MOSAIC) to investigate the extent to which the optional infinitive (OI) phenomenon in Dutch and English can be explained in terms of a resource-limited distributional analysis of Dutch and English child-directed speech. The results show that the same version of MOSAIC is able to simulate changes in the pattern of finiteness marking in 2 children learning Dutch and 2 children learning English as the average length of their utterances increases. These results suggest that it is possible to explain the key features of the OI phenomenon in both Dutch and English in terms of the interaction between an utterance-final bias in learning and the distributional characteristics of child-directed speech in the 2 languages. They also show how computational modeling techniques can be used to investigate the extent to which cross-linguistic similarities in the developmental data can be explained in terms of common processing constraints as opposed to innate knowledge of universal grammar.

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Semantics of Verbs and the Development of Verb Inflection in Child Language

Cited by 119 publications

References 0 publications

The Development of Verb Concepts: Children's Use of Verbs to Label Familiar and Novel Events

The Development of Verb Concepts: Children's Use of Verbs to Label Familiar and Novel Events

Exposure and feedback in language acquisition: adult construals of children's early verb-form use in Hebrew

Modeling the Development of Children's Use of Optional Infinitives in Dutch and English Using MOSAIC

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