Chapter published in:
Semantics in Language Acquisition
Edited by Kristen Syrett and Sudha Arunachalam
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 24] 2018
► pp. 68–92

Chapter 4
Semantic features of early verb vocabularies

| Boston University
| Bryn Mawr College
| Boston University

Much research has asked why verbs are difficult to acquire, and how toddlers nevertheless acquire them. Still, we know little about what kinds of verb meanings are easy or difficult to acquire. We revisit Rescorla and colleagues’ data on vocabulary knowledge in toddlers acquiring English, Italian, Greek, Korean, and Portuguese measured using the Language Development Survey. We coded the survey’s verbs for several semantic features to determine which features predict appearance in toddlers’ vocabularies. For English, manner and result verbs were equally well known across samples, but verbs labeling durative events and events with fewer event participants were more likely to be known than those labeling punctual events and events involving more participants. Similar trends held in the other languages.

Keywords: vocabulary composition, verbs, lexical semantics, verb learning, cross-linguistic, language development survey
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Our dataset: Data from the language development survey (Rescorla, 1989)
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Verbs
    • 2.3Semantic dimensions
      • 2.3.1Manner vs. result
      • 2.3.2Durative vs. punctual
      • 2.3.3Number of obligatory event participants
    • 2.4Covariates
      • 2.4.1Frequency
      • 2.4.2Imageability
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Manner vs. result
      • 3.1.1English
      • 3.1.2Other languages
    • 3.2Durative vs. punctual
      • 3.2.1English
      • 3.2.2Other languages
    • 3.3Number of obligatory event participants
      • 3.3.1English
      • 3.3.2Other languages
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Summary of results
    • 4.2Limitations and future directions
  • Acknowledgement
  • References
Published online: 02 August 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.24.04hor
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