Why are some verbs learned before other verbs? Effects of input frequency and structure on children's early verb use

Abstract

This study investigated the extent to which the nature of verb input accounts for the order in which children acquire verbs. We assessed the nature of verb input using a combined sample of the speech of 57 mothers addressing their Stage I children. We assessed the order of verb acquisition using as our database a combined sample of those children's speech 10 weeks later and using as our measure of order of acquisition the frequency of verb occurrence. The first set of analyses established the validity of this measure of acquisition order by comparing it with order of acquisition data obtained from checklist and diary data. The second set of analyses revealed that three properties of the input were significant predictors of the order of acquisition of the 25 verbs that were the focus of this study. The predictive properties of input were the total frequency, final position frequency, and diversity of syntactic environments in which the verbs appeared. These findings suggest that the way verbs appear in input influences their ease of acquisition. More specifically, the effect of syntactic diversity in input provides support for the syntactic bootstrapping account of how children use structural information to learn the meaning of new verbs.

The company that words keep: comparing the statistical structure of child- versus adult-directed language

“…Hayes & Clark, 1970;Newman, 2008 ;, artificial language learning (Gillette, Gleitman, Gleitman & Lederer, 1999 ;Kachergis, Yu & Shiffrin, 2012;Plaut & Kello, 1999 ;Recchia, Johns & Jones, 2008 ;Yu & Smith, 2007), and rapid and diverse vocabulary acquisition (e.g. Hoff & Naigles, 2002;Hurtado, Marchman & Fernald, 2008 ;Huttenlocher, Haight, Bryk, Seltzer & Lyons, 1991 ;Naigles & Hoff-Ginsberg, 1998 ;Rowe, 2008). On the other hand, consistency (i.e.…”

Acquisition of the Malagasy voicing system: implications for the adult grammar

“…Rumelhart and McClelland 1986), take statistical properties of the input to be the primary determinant of development, and some acquisition studies have shown that the relative frequency of particular pieces of morphology (e.g. Hseieh et al (1999)) and of particular lexical items such as verbs (Naigles and Hoff-Ginsberg 1998) correlate with their order of acquisition in the child's language. It has also been proposed that the acquisition of particular syntactic constructions, for example wh questions, is affected by the relative frequency of specific wh + verb combinations in the input (Rowland et al 2003).…”

Form is easy, meaning is hard: resolving a paradox in early child language

“…The addition of another frame might have helped the toddlers figure out the authors' intended meaning of the verb (i.e. syntactic bootstrapping with multiple frames, which has been shown to facilitate toddlers' production and comprehension of verbs; Gleitman, 1990;Landau & Gleitman, 1985;Naigles, 1996Naigles, , 1998Naigles & Hoff-Ginsberg, 1998). Moreover, it effectively demonstrated to the children that each verb could be produced in more than one way; this variability could have helped overcome the production problems detailed in Section 3.2 above.…”