LEXICAL PRINCIPLES MAY UNDERLIE THE LEARNING OF VERBS

To examine whether children (mean age 34 months) can fast map and exte nd novel action labels to actions for which they do not already have n ames, the comprehension of familiar and novel verbs was tested using c olored drawings of Sesame Street characters performing both familiar a nd unfamiliar actions. Children were asked to point to the character ' 'verbing,'' from among sets of 4 drawings. With familiar words and act ions, children made correct choices 97% of the time. With novel action words, children performed at levels mostly significantly above chance , selecting a previously unlabeled action or another token of a just-n ames action. In a second, control experiment children were asked to se lect an action from among the same sets of 4 drawings, but they were n ot given a novel action name. Here children mainly demonstrated perfor mance at levels not significantly different from chance, showing that the results from the main experiment were attributable to the presence of a word in the request. Results of these studies are interpreted as support for the availability of principles to ease verb acquisition.