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.

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, University of Washington 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 12. Are nouns easier to learn than verbs? Three experimental studies, Jane B. Childers & Michael Tomasello 13. Verbs at the beginning: Parallels between comprehension and input, Letitia Naigles & Erika Hoff 14. A unified theory of word learning: Putting verb acquisition in context, Mandy Maguire, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek & Roberta Golinkoff 15. Who's the subject? Sentence structure and verb meaning, Cynthia Fisher & Hyun-joo Song IV. How language influences verb learning: Cross-linguistic evidence 16. Verb-learning as a probe into children's grammars, Jeff Lidz 17. Revisiting the noun-verb debate: A crosslinguistic comparison of novel noun and verb learning in English-, Japanese- and Chinese-speaking children, Mutsumi Imai, Etsuko Haryo, Hiroyuki Okada, Li Lianjing, & Jun Shigematsu 18. But are they really verbs?: Chinese words for action, Twila Tardif 19. Influences of object knowledge on the acquisition of verbs in English and Japanese, Alan W. Kersten, Linda B. Smith, & Hanako Yoshida 20. East and west: A role for culture in the acquisition of nouns and verbs, Tracy Lavin & D. Geoffrey Hall, & Sandra R. Waxman 21. Why verbs are hard to learn, Dedre Gentner V. What have we learned about verb learning? 22. Lila Gleitman

Kathy Hirsh-PasekProfessor of Psychology, Temple University, Roberta Michnik GolinkoffRodney Sharp Professor, School of Education, University of Delaware

"A collection of the most recent and ground-breaking research in verb learning, this book at long last gives the verbs of language the attention they deserve. Action Meets Word is both timely and important, destined to endure as an important and sought after resource in the study of language acquisition."--Lois Bloom, Edward Lee Thorndike, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University |k No