Why Is a Verb Like an Inanimate Object? Grammatical Category and Semantic Category Deficits

A Unified Theory of Word Learning: Putting Verb Acquisition in Context

“…Borrowing from literature suggesting that all concepts encoded by words fall along a single continuum of "abstractness," we dub this continuum "SICI." Following work by Golinkoff et al (1995), Bird, et al (2000b;2003), Black and Chiat (2003), Gentner and Boroditsky (2001), and Gillette et al (1999), we next describe how together the SICI continuum and the ECM explain not only noun learning, but also illuminate the verb learning paradox and the developmental path children follow as they learn verbs. Consistent with Gillette et al (1999) andBoroditsky (2001), children can map words onto verbs if the actions they denote are relatively concrete.…”

“…In creating this continuum, we again borrow from Gentner and Boroditsky (2001), Snedeker and Gleitman (2004), research in neurolinguistics (Bird et al, 2000b;Black & Chiat, 2003), and our own work (Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, Mervis, Frawley, & Parillo, 1995;Golinkoff, et al, 2002). We use SICI instead of relying on any one feature of the continuum for two reasons.…”

Unaccusative verb production in agrammatic aphasia: the argument structure complexity hypothesis

“…While recent research focused on determining the nature of verb production deficits has shown that several factors may play a role in this production difficulty, including frequency and familiarity (Kemmerer & Tranel, 2000), imageability (Bird, Howard, & Franklin, 2000), and semantic factors (Breedin, Saffran, & Schwartz, 1998), the number of syntactic arguments associated with the verb and corresponding participant roles has been shown to influence verb production in several studies (Jonkers & Bastiaanse, 1996Kegl, 1995;Kemmerer & Tranel, 2000;Kim & Thompson, 2000;Kiss, 2000 Lange, Schneider, & Shapiro, 1997; Thompson, Shapiro, Li, & Schendel, 1995a). For example, Thompson et al (1995aThompson et al ( , 1997 found that agrammatic aphasic subjects with verb retrieval difficulty in both verb naming and in sentence production showed a pattern of verb production deficit in both tasks related to the number of arguments associated with the verb.…”

“…Variables such as frequency of occurrence, familiarity, imageability, and age of acquisition also have been shown to influence production; for example, items with greater frequency of occurrence or greater imageability are easier to produce likely because they are activated more strongly than those with lower frequency and imageability. Although not as well studied, verb production appears to be influenced by many of the same variables (Bird et al, 2000;Breedin et al, 1998;Kemmerer & Tranel, 2000). One additional feature of the lexical representation of verbs, that is not relevant to nouns, concerns their argument structure properties.…”

Progressive knowledge loss: A longitudinal case study

“…For the mild-tomoderate-degeneration stages, Tyler et al (2000) predicted that only the ability to determine the category to which living stimuli belong would be spared. Keeping in mind VZ's general loss of knowledge for items of both categories, note that (1) she performs best with the help of functional features of nonliving things, and that (2) her ability to identify objects by referring to actions that can be performed with them (by producing verbs in her attempts to answer) is still intact (see also Bird et al, 2000;Bak & Hodges, 2003;Silveri et al, 2003). These two facts suggest that even in the final stages of her illness VZ might still rely on some knowledge of actions, perhaps supported by the activation of the affordance representation of objects.…”