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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 1998

LETITIA R. NAIGLES  and
ERIKA HOFF-GINSBERG
LETITIA R. NAIGLES
Affiliation:
Yale University
ERIKA HOFF-GINSBERG
Affiliation:
Florida Atlantic University
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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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , February 1998 , pp. 95 - 120
Copyright
© 1998 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This research was supported by NIH FIRST Award HD26595 to the first author, and NIH grant HD20936 to the second author. We thank M. David Greenspon and Vaijanthi Sarma for their expert parsing, and Lori Slager and Nancy McGraw for their help with the analyses. We also thank Jill deVilliers, Elena Lieven, Twila Tardif, Michael Tomasello, Virginia Valian and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful commentaries on this research. Portions of this paper were presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, New Orleans, LA, March 1993.