ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the processes that may have specific importance for verb learning, such as children's biases to attend to particular aspects of events. These processes are classified as child-driven, environment-driven, and language-driven. Bates et al. found that 13-month-old children varied widely in referential capability, as measured by the proportion of common nouns in receptive and productive vocabularies. Antinucci and Miller in 1976 showed an analogous pattern of findings for children learning Italian. Behrend found that children actually used the least frequent types of verbs instrument verbs most frequently as labels for familiar events for which there was an appropriate instrument verb label. The chapter concludes by arguing that before a unified theory of semantic development is achieved, it is necessary to understand the nature and contributions of all three of the processes described here and the degree to which these processes contribute differently to noun and verb acquisition.
