- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Preface
- Contributors
- Introduction: Progress on the Verb Learning Front
- 1 Finding the Verbs: Distributional Cues to Categories Available to Young Learners
- 2 Finding Verb Forms Within the Continuous Speech Stream
- 3 Discovering Verbs Through Multiple-Cue Integration
- 4 Actions Organize the Infant’s World
- 5 Conceptual Foundations for Verb Learning: Celebrating the Event
- 6 Precursors to Verb Learning: Infants' Understanding of Motion Events
- 7 Preverbal Spatial Cognition and Language-Specific Input: Categories of Containment and Support
- 8 The Roots of Verbs in Prelinguistic Action Knowledge
- 9 When Is a Grasp a Grasp? Characterizing Some Basic Components of Human Action Processing
- 10 Word, Intention, and Action: A Two-Tiered Model of Action Word Learning
- 11 Verbs, Actions, and Intentions
- 12 Are Nouns Easier to Learn Than Verbs? Three Experimental Studies
- 13 Verbs at the Very Beginning: Parallels Between Comprehension and Input
- 14 A Unified Theory of Word Learning: Putting Verb Acquisition in Context
- 15 Who's the Subject? Sentence Structure and Verb Meaning
- 16 Verb Learning as a Probe Into Children's Grammars
- 17 Revisiting the Noun-Verb Debate: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison of Novel Noun and Verb Learning in English-, Japanese-, and Chinese-Speaking Children
- 18 But Are They Really Verbs? Chinese Words for Action
- 19 Influences of Object Knowledge on the Acquisition of Verbs in English and Japanese
- 20 East and West: A Role for Culture in the Acquisition of Nouns and Verbs
- 21 Why Verbs Are Hard to Learn
- Author Index
- Subject Index
Why Verbs Are Hard to Learn
Why Verbs Are Hard to Learn
- Chapter:
- (p.544) 21 Why Verbs Are Hard to Learn
- Source:
- Action Meets Word
- Author(s):
Dedre Gentner
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
This chapter argues that words connect to the world in very different ways, that (concrete) nouns do so more transparently than verbs, and that verb meanings are more linguistically shaped than (concrete) noun meanings. Although many factors at all levels contribute to determining what is learned early by children, these semantic-conceptual factors are certainly among the core influences on how words connect to the world.
Keywords: verbs, nouns, noun meanings, verb meanings
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- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Preface
- Contributors
- Introduction: Progress on the Verb Learning Front
- 1 Finding the Verbs: Distributional Cues to Categories Available to Young Learners
- 2 Finding Verb Forms Within the Continuous Speech Stream
- 3 Discovering Verbs Through Multiple-Cue Integration
- 4 Actions Organize the Infant’s World
- 5 Conceptual Foundations for Verb Learning: Celebrating the Event
- 6 Precursors to Verb Learning: Infants' Understanding of Motion Events
- 7 Preverbal Spatial Cognition and Language-Specific Input: Categories of Containment and Support
- 8 The Roots of Verbs in Prelinguistic Action Knowledge
- 9 When Is a Grasp a Grasp? Characterizing Some Basic Components of Human Action Processing
- 10 Word, Intention, and Action: A Two-Tiered Model of Action Word Learning
- 11 Verbs, Actions, and Intentions
- 12 Are Nouns Easier to Learn Than Verbs? Three Experimental Studies
- 13 Verbs at the Very Beginning: Parallels Between Comprehension and Input
- 14 A Unified Theory of Word Learning: Putting Verb Acquisition in Context
- 15 Who's the Subject? Sentence Structure and Verb Meaning
- 16 Verb Learning as a Probe Into Children's Grammars
- 17 Revisiting the Noun-Verb Debate: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison of Novel Noun and Verb Learning in English-, Japanese-, and Chinese-Speaking Children
- 18 But Are They Really Verbs? Chinese Words for Action
- 19 Influences of Object Knowledge on the Acquisition of Verbs in English and Japanese
- 20 East and West: A Role for Culture in the Acquisition of Nouns and Verbs
- 21 Why Verbs Are Hard to Learn
- Author Index
- Subject Index
