Learning the meaning of verbs: what distinguishes language-impaired from normally developing children

Abstract

Using evidence from both production and comprehension data, this paper addresses the question of how normally developing and language-impaired children acquire the meanings of first verbs. The spontaneous speech of seven German-speaking children (three of whom are language-impaired) at the onset of speech production was analyzed with respect to the emergence of verbs and the type of event associated with them. In addition, 64 children between the ages of two and eight, 32 of them language-impaired, were asked to judge different types of event-verb mappings. Our results suggest a substantial difference between the two groups with regard to the learning algorithms employed in acquiring the meanings of verbs. It is proposed that these findings can be accounted for in terms of violations of learnability-driven constraints, which characterize the language of impaired children but not the language of normally developing children.