WORDS, WORDS, WORDS

Traditional accounts of vocabulary acquisition assume that children su cceed by aligning the utterance of words with their environmental cont ingencies, a word-to-world pairing. Experimental results suggest that such a procedure accounts for the acquisition of nouns but is insuffic ient for the acquisition of verbs. It is demonstrated that infants und er two years of age systematically recruit the structural properties o f sentences in which novel verbs occur to find their meanings: a sente nce-to-world pairing procedure.