Table of Contents
I. Prerequisites to verb learning: Finding the verb
1. Finding the verbs: Distributional cues available to young learners , Toby Mintz
2. Finding verb forms within the continuous speech stream, Thierry Nazzi & Derek Houston
3. Discovering verbs through multiple-cue integration, Morten H. Christiansen & Padraic Monaghan
II. Prequisites to verb learning: Finding actions in events
4. Actions organize the infant's world, Jean Mandler
5. Conceptual foundations for verb learning: Celebrating the event, Rachel Pulverman, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Roberta M. Golinkoff, Shannon Pruden, & Sara J. Salkind
6. Precursors to verb learning: Infants' understanding of motion events, Marianella Cassassola, Jui Bhagwat & Kim T. Ferguson
7. Preverbal spatial cognition and language-specific input: Categories of containment and support, Soonja Choi
8. The roots of verbs: Prelinguistic action knowledge, Jennifer Sootsman Buresh, Amanda Woodward, & Camille Brune
9. When is a grasp a grasp?, Jeffrey Loucks & Dare Baldwin
10. Word, intention, and action: A two-tiered model of action word learning, Diane Poulin-Dubois & James Forbes
11. Verbs, actions, and intentions, Douglas A. Behrend & Jason M. Scofield
III. When action meets word: Children learn their first verbs
12. Are nouns easier to learn than verbs? Three experimental studies, Jane B. Childers & Michael Tomasello
13. Verbs at the beginning: Parallels between comprehension and input, Letitia Naigles & Erika Hoff
14. A unified theory of word learning: Putting verb acquisition in context, Mandy Maguire, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek & Roberta Golinkoff
15. Who's the subject? Sentence structure and verb meaning, Cynthia Fisher & Hyun-joo Song
IV. How language influences verb learning: Cross-linguistic evidence
16. Verb-learning as a probe into children's grammars, Jeff Lidz
17. Revisiting the noun-verb debate: A crosslinguistic comparison of novel noun and verb learning in English-, Japanese- and Chinese-speaking children, Mutsumi Imai, Etsuko Haryo, Hiroyuki Okada, Li Lianjing, & Jun Shigematsu
18. But are they really verbs?: Chinese words for action, Twila Tardif
19. Influences of object knowledge on the acquisition of verbs in English and Japanese, Alan W. Kersten, Linda B. Smith, & Hanako Yoshida
20. East and west: A role for culture in the acquisition of nouns and verbs , Tracy Lavin & D. Geoffrey Hall, & Sandra R. Waxman
21. Why verbs are hard to learn , Dedre Gentner
V. What have we learned about verb learning?
22. Lila Gleitman