ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some alternative approaches to thinking about the nature, role, and acquisition of verbs in typical and atypical child language using ideas derived from the growing literature on "small-world" networks. It focuses on the verb use of children at the tails of this large distribution of expressive skills, defined simply by their mean utterance length in morphemes. The language samples were audio-recorded as children and their caregivers played with a consistent set of toys at the end of an assessment session involving measures of hearing, cognition, vocabulary comprehension, and articulation. The deployment of verbs in multiword utterances by the Normal language (NL) group was consistent with the "80/20" distribution expected of a system with emergent organization. Specifically, in the NL group the proportion of multiword utterances containing a top-20% verb ranged from 0.64 to 0.92, with a mean proportion of 0.75. The literature on verbs in children with specific language impairment is a case in point.
