Why theories of word learning don't always work as theories of verb learning.
Bloom's theory of word learning has difficulty accounting for children's verb acquisition. There is no predominant preverbal event concept, akin to the preverbal object concept, to direct children's early event-verb mappings. Children may take advantage of grammatical and linguistic information in verb acquisition earlier than Bloom allows. A distinction between lexical and grammatical learning is difficult to maintain for verb acquisition.
Naigles
Letitia R
LR
Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269-1020 Naigles@uconnvm.uconn.edu.