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…

Do children learn a new word by tracking co-occurrences between words and referents across multiple instances ("cross-situational learning" models), or is word-learning a "one-track" process, where learners maintain a single hypothesis about the possible referent, which may be verified or falsified in future occurrences…