The world's languages draw on a common set of event components for their verb systems. Yet, these components are differentially distributed across languages. At what age do children begin to use language-specific patterns to narrow possible verb meanings? English-, Japanese-, and Spanish-speaking adults, toddlers, and preschoolers were shown…

In the study reported here, Japanese-speaking children aged 3-6 were confronted with making choices based on conflicting input from speakers who varied in the degree of certainty and the quality of evidence they possessed for their opinions. Certainty and evidentiality are encoded in Japanese both in high-frequency, closed-class, sentence-final…

Examined the extent to which maternal linguistic input enabled children to use syntactic bootstrapping. Studied uses of 25 common verbs in speech of 57 mothers to their 1-year olds and 2-year olds. Found that verbs can be used to create informative syntactic frames, syntactic frames can cue appropriate verb class, and multiple syntactic framing…