How do children learn the meanings of verbs?

Abstract

ONCE children have begun to learn their native tongue, they acquire vocabulary at a remarkable rate. An intelligent 6-yr-old is able to recognise 13,000 words, and more than double that number 2 yr later¹. According to orthodox linguistic theory, the learning of verbs and other relational terms ought to be difficult because, in addition to their meaning, they have ‘selectional restrictions’, which constrain the noun phrases that can occur with them². A child must learn, for example, both the meaning of the verb ‘fly’ and the fact that it takes subjects which are restricted to denoting moveable objects. This linguistic theory has, however, been criticised, and it may be a misleading basis for a model of language acquisition since meaning and selectional restrictions can hardly be independent³. In particular, the subjects and objects that occur with a verb might help the child to infer its meaning, and likewise the meaning of a verb might help to define its possible subjects and objects.