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.
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Haebig, Eileen, Eva Jiménez, Christopher R Cox & Thomas T Hills
2021. Characterizing the early vocabulary profiles of preverbal and minimally verbal children with autism spectrum disorder. Autism 25:4 ► pp. 958 ff.
Jiménez, Eva, Eileen Haebig & Thomas T. Hills
2021. Identifying Areas of Overlap and Distinction in Early Lexical Profiles of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, Late Talkers, and Typical Talkers. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 51:9 ► pp. 3109 ff.
2019. The syntactic and semantic features of two-year-olds’ verb vocabularies: a comparison of typically developing children and late talkers. Journal of Child Language 46:3 ► pp. 409 ff.
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