ACTION MEETS WORD: HOWCHILDREN LEARN VERBS. Edited byKathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta M.Golinkoff. Oxford University Press,Oxford, 2005. pp. 588. Price: $75.00,£46.00. ISBN 0195170008.

As its title suggests, this is not a bookaimed at the reader with a more generalinterest in child development, focussingas it does on a particular topic (verb-learning) in a particular subfield oflanguage acquisition (word-learning).That said, the 21 chapters of this vo-lume between them approach the topicof verb-learning from a sufficientlywide range of theoretical and metho-dological angles to ensure that mostchild language researchers will find atleast something to interest them.

The three chapters that comprise thefirst section investigate the question ofhow learners extract verbs from thecontinuous speech stream and groupthem into a word class. A consensusemerges from these chapters that lear-ners accomplish both parts of this taskby integrating a wide range of phono-logical and prosodic cues such as stresspattern, duration, number of syllables,vowel quality, and statistical/distribu-tional information. The field seems tohave made real progress in addressingthe question of how children groupwords into form-classes such as VERBand NOUN. Twenty years ago, thedominant view was probably that thiswas impossible without recourse to in-nate knowledge (such as the innate ca-tegory of VERB linked to the semanticnotion of ACTION, e.g. Pinker, 1984),with the possibility that the child mightuse distributional information rejectedout of hand. In fact, the chaptersby Mintz and by Christiansen andChater demonstrate that distributionalinformation alone can yield, in princi-ple at least, reasonably accurate classi-fications of lexical items.

The second section is primarily con-cerned with research on the ability ofpre-linguistic infants to categorize ac-

tion-events along dimensions that lan-guages encode. Some categories (e.g. ofsimilar events of containment or path-of-motion) appear to be formed cross-cul-turally and spontaneously, whilst others(support or manner-of-motion) are formedlater, and may require specific linguisticinput (see chapters by Casaola et al. andby Pulverman et al.). Other studies in-vestigate children’s understanding ofadults’ intentions (e-chapters by Poulin-Dubois & Forbes and by Behrend &Scofield), concluding that children be-low age two have difficulty in under-standing others’ intentions.

However, one problem with bothstrands of research is that investigatorssometimes adopt a rather top-down,linguistic-centred approach: The re-searcher formulates a problem that,based on linguistic theorizing, appearsto be central to verb-learning (e.g. thatsome languages conflate manner ofmotion into the verb, whilst othersconflate path, or that some verbs denoteevents that are not perceptually avail-able), and then asks how the child solvesit. From the point of view of the child,whose linguistic goal is not to discoverprecise, comprehensive verb meaningsbut to manipulate adults’ behaviour,these problems may well be peripheral,particularly to early verb-learning.

In fact, many verbs that, from a lin-guistic perspective, may seem especiallydifficult to acquire (e.g. manner of mo-tion verbs such as run, and psychologi-cal verbs such as like and see) appearamongst children’s earliest multiwordutterances (Theakston, Lieven, Pine, &Rowland, 2001). Of course, the use of averb does not imply mastery of the fullrange of its meanings, but one must besure to apply this criterion equallystringently to verbs (and nouns) that arepredicted to be early- and late-acquiredunder one’s theory.

The third section (and some chaptersin the final section) reports experimentalstudies in which children are taughtnovel verbs. This seems to be ratherdifficult to do. Childers and Tomasello

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(Chapter 12) found that children aged2;2 were unable to learn a novel verb inan experimental setting (showing muchbetter performance for nouns). Maguire,Hirsh-Pasek, and Golinkoff (Chapter 14)and Imai et al. (Chapter 17) report that—in some conditions—even 5-year olds(English, Chinese, and Japanese) cannotextend an experimentally taught novelverb to a scene in which the action isperformed with a different object. Thesefindings are typically interpreted asshowing that verb-learning is hard. Theysuggest to me, however, that these tasks(generally preferential-looking/point-ing) may, in some cases, not reveal thetrue extent of children’s verb-learningabilities: Taken to their logical conclusionsuch findings would suggest that 5-yearolds are not aware that, for example,drawing with a new pen is still calleddrawing and that 2-year olds cannot yetlearn some action verbs at all (or at leastwithout a very large number of ex-posures).

In keeping with this theme, the con-sensus of the final section on cross-lin-guistic influences is that verbs are harderto learn than (concrete) nouns, withmany authors citing checklist and natur-alistic-data studies showing a noun-ad-vantage even for languages that might beexpected to be ‘verb-friendly’. Whilstnobody would dispute that some nouns(particularly concrete nouns) are easier toacquire than some verbs (particularlythose denoting complex activities), sim-ply counting nouns and verbs in chil-dren’s vocabularies does notconvincingly demonstrate this. The ratioof nouns to verbs is similar in children’svocabularies (approximately 5:1; seeGentner, Chapter 21) and the adult lex-icon (at least in the Oxford English Dic-tionary). This is not because adults findverbs difficult to learn, but simply be-cause languages seem to ‘need’ moredifferent nouns than verbs (Tardiff,Chapter 18). What is needed are studiescomparing noun-to-verb ratios (tokensand types) in child and adult vocabul-

aries and spontaneous speech data todetermine whether children produce asmaller proportion of verbs than onewould expect, given the language thatthey hear.

So where to now for the field of wordlearning? A shortcoming of early word-learning research was its almost ex-clusive focus on nouns. Consequently,word-learning procedures were pro-posed that could in fact hinder thelearning of other word types, verbs in-cluded (Tomasello, 2003). Hirsh-Pasekand Golinkoff’s book goes a long waytowards redressing the balance. How-ever, whilst today’s researchers havemoved away from studying noun learn-ing qua word learning, they must becareful to avoid studying action verblearning (sometimes solely motion verblearning) qua verb learning. Rather, futureresearch should investigate how childrenlearn words of all types (possibly byprocesses such as cross-situational dis-tributional analysis). It is to be hoped thatthis book will stimulate such research.

REFERENCES

Pinker, S. (1984). Language learnability andlanguage development. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press.

Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E. L.(1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274, 1926–1928.

Theakston, A. L., Lieven, E. V. M.,Pine, J. M., & Rowland, C. F. (2001). Therole of performance limitations in theacquisition of verb-argument structure:An alternative account. Journal of ChildLanguage, 28(1), 127–152.

Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a lan-guage: A usage-based theory of languageacquisition. Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press.

Ben AmbridgeDepartment of Psychology, University of

Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

DOI: 10.1002/icd.587

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Copyright r 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Inf. Child. Dev. 18: 95–104 (2009)