title: The early acquisition of verb meaning in German by normally developing and language impaired children.
abstract: The research reported here focuses on the early acquisition of event structure in German. Based on longitudinal studies from 5 normally developing (ND) and 6 language-impaired (LI) children, a model of "event structural bootstrapping" is presented that spells out how ND children log into the verb lexicon. They project a target-consistent event tree, depicting the head-of-event of transitions. Young LI children, failing to employ this bootstrapping strategy, resort to radically underspecified event representations. The results from a truth-value judgment experiment with 16 ND and 16 LI children showed that ND children perform correctly on transitional verbs, while LI children perform at chance level on the same tasks. These findings are accounted for by the model of event structural bootstrapping to the extent that LI children lack an explicit representation of the head-of-event.
authors.affiliation: University of Konstanz, Germany. Schulzpetra@aol.com
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Schulz
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Wymann
authors.forename: Z
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Penner
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007806:Language Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis*; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D012660:Semantics; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D014706:Verbal Learning