Verbs are harder to learn than nouns in English and in many other languages, but are relatively easy to learn in Chinese. This paper evaluates one potential explanation for these findings by examining the construct of imageability, or the ability of a word to produce a mental image. Chinese adults rated the imageability of Chinese words from the Chinese Communicative Development Inventory (Tard...

Sound-symbolism is the nonarbitrary link between the sound and meaning of a word. Japanesespeaking children performed better in a verb generalization task when they were taught novel sound-symbolic verbs, created based on existing Japanese sound-symbolic words, than novel nonsound-symbolic verbs (Imai, Kita, Nagumo, & Okada, 2008). A question remained as to whether the Japanese children had pic...

English-learning children have been shown to reliably use cues from argument structure in learning verbs. However, languages pair overtly expressed arguments with verbs to varying extents, raising the question of whether children learning all languages expect the same, universal mapping between arguments and relational roles. Three experiments examined this question by asking how strongly early...

This study entitled Mapping Grammatical Relations of English Verbs, concerns on numbers arguments that a verb could assign and how an argument is syntactically motivated in clauses which the mood declarative. involves to library research, method was applied this descriptive describes linguistics phenomena like what it actually is. The data were taken from Corpus Contemporary American (COCA) by ...

Languages vary in how they encode motion events. For example, English motion verbs often encode the manner of the motion while Spanish motion verbs encode the path. Efficient verb learning has been argued to involve the acquisition of language specific lexicalization biases. When given a novel verb paired with a single motion event, English speakers interpret it as a manner verb, Spanish speake...