- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Preface
- Contributors
- Introduction: Progress on the Verb Learning Front
- 1 Finding the Verbs: Distributional Cues to Categories Available to Young Learners
- 2 Finding Verb Forms Within the Continuous Speech Stream
- 3 Discovering Verbs Through Multiple-Cue Integration
- 4 Actions Organize the Infant’s World
- 5 Conceptual Foundations for Verb Learning: Celebrating the Event
- 6 Precursors to Verb Learning: Infants' Understanding of Motion Events
- 7 Preverbal Spatial Cognition and Language-Specific Input: Categories of Containment and Support
- 8 The Roots of Verbs in Prelinguistic Action Knowledge
- 9 When Is a Grasp a Grasp? Characterizing Some Basic Components of Human Action Processing
- 10 Word, Intention, and Action: A Two-Tiered Model of Action Word Learning
- 11 Verbs, Actions, and Intentions
- 12 Are Nouns Easier to Learn Than Verbs? Three Experimental Studies
- 13 Verbs at the Very Beginning: Parallels Between Comprehension and Input
- 14 A Unified Theory of Word Learning: Putting Verb Acquisition in Context
- 15 Who's the Subject? Sentence Structure and Verb Meaning
- 16 Verb Learning as a Probe Into Children's Grammars
- 17 Revisiting the Noun-Verb Debate: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison of Novel Noun and Verb Learning in English-, Japanese-, and Chinese-Speaking Children
- 18 But Are They Really Verbs? Chinese Words for Action
- 19 Influences of Object Knowledge on the Acquisition of Verbs in English and Japanese
- 20 East and West: A Role for Culture in the Acquisition of Nouns and Verbs
- 21 Why Verbs Are Hard to Learn
- Author Index
- Subject Index
Word, Intention, and Action: A Two-Tiered Model of Action Word Learning
Word, Intention, and Action: A Two-Tiered Model of Action Word Learning
- Chapter:
- (p.262) 10 Word, Intention, and Action: A Two-Tiered Model of Action Word Learning
- Source:
- Action Meets Word
- Author(s):
Diane Poulin-Dubois
James N. Forbes
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
This chapter examines how children's cognitive, social, and linguistic abilities interact to enable them to analyze action in events and learn novel verbs. It argues that “infants not only are competent in discriminating human actions and object motion but also understand that many different agents are capable of performing the same actions by the beginning of the second year.” However, these achievements are insufficient for verb learning and extension because toddlers must become aware of the intentions of the actor. Verb learning and extension first occur based on a superficial perceptual analysis of how the action looks, followed by learning and extension based more on what the actor intends to do.
Keywords: action word learning, linguistic abilities, novel verbs, language acquisition, action discrimination, object motion
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- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Preface
- Contributors
- Introduction: Progress on the Verb Learning Front
- 1 Finding the Verbs: Distributional Cues to Categories Available to Young Learners
- 2 Finding Verb Forms Within the Continuous Speech Stream
- 3 Discovering Verbs Through Multiple-Cue Integration
- 4 Actions Organize the Infant’s World
- 5 Conceptual Foundations for Verb Learning: Celebrating the Event
- 6 Precursors to Verb Learning: Infants' Understanding of Motion Events
- 7 Preverbal Spatial Cognition and Language-Specific Input: Categories of Containment and Support
- 8 The Roots of Verbs in Prelinguistic Action Knowledge
- 9 When Is a Grasp a Grasp? Characterizing Some Basic Components of Human Action Processing
- 10 Word, Intention, and Action: A Two-Tiered Model of Action Word Learning
- 11 Verbs, Actions, and Intentions
- 12 Are Nouns Easier to Learn Than Verbs? Three Experimental Studies
- 13 Verbs at the Very Beginning: Parallels Between Comprehension and Input
- 14 A Unified Theory of Word Learning: Putting Verb Acquisition in Context
- 15 Who's the Subject? Sentence Structure and Verb Meaning
- 16 Verb Learning as a Probe Into Children's Grammars
- 17 Revisiting the Noun-Verb Debate: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison of Novel Noun and Verb Learning in English-, Japanese-, and Chinese-Speaking Children
- 18 But Are They Really Verbs? Chinese Words for Action
- 19 Influences of Object Knowledge on the Acquisition of Verbs in English and Japanese
- 20 East and West: A Role for Culture in the Acquisition of Nouns and Verbs
- 21 Why Verbs Are Hard to Learn
- Author Index
- Subject Index