Specifying the Role of Linguistic Information in Verb Learning

Decades of research have documented that acquiring the meanings of verbs is, on average, more difficult than acquiring the meanings of nouns. This is likely because verb learning requires more information, and information of a different kind, than noun learning. One particularly powerful source of information for verb learning is linguistic context. For example, Naigles (1990) demonstrated in a classic study that 2-year-olds infer that verbs appearing in transitive sentences carry causative meanings. The present study explores in more detail what aspects of the linguistic information that is typically carried in a transitive sentence—the syntactic structure itself, and/or the semantic content of the noun phrases introducing the arguments—are most useful for these young verb learners.