Learning transitive verbs from single-word verbs in the input by young children acquiring English.

The environmental context of verbs addressed by adults to young children is claimed to be uninformative regarding the verbs' meaning, yielding the Syntactic Bootstrapping Hypothesis that, for verb learning, full sentences are needed to demonstrate the semantic arguments of verbs. However, reanalysis of Gleitman's (1990) original data regarding input to a blind child revealed the context of single-word parental verbs to be more transparent than that of sentences. We tested the hypothesis that English-speaking children learn their early verbs from parents' single-word utterances. Distribution of single-word transitive verbs produced by a large sample of young children was strongly predicted by the relative token frequency of verbs in parental single-word utterances, but multiword sentences had no predictive value. Analysis of the interactive context showed that objects of verbs are retrievable by pragmatic inference, as is the meaning of the verbs. Single-word input appears optimal for learning an initial vocabulary of verbs.