Verbs serve as the architectural centerpiece of sentences, making verb learning pivotal for language acquisition. Verb learning requires both the formation of a verb-action mapping and the abstraction of relations between an object and its action. Two competing positions have been proposed to explain the process of verb learning: (a) seeing a…

One of the most fundamental aspects of learning a language is determining the mappings between words and referents. An often-overlooked complication is that infants interact with multiple individuals who may not produce words in the same way. In the present study, we explored whether 10- to 12-month-olds can use talker-specific knowledge to infer…

The present study investigates English-learning infants' early understanding of the link between the grammatical category "verb" and the conceptual category "event," and their ability to recruit morphosyntactic information online to learn novel verb meanings. We report two experiments using an infant-controlled…