S35MZ

Eva Rodríguez Cárdenas
linguistic information (speaker cues). Verbs are
supposed to be more difficult to learn because
they refer to relations within events, and any
event can be conceptualized in terms of a multitude
of different components, because of that
children have to decide which relation or group
of relations in an event is the verb referent.
Children were successful in learning a novel
verb only in the condition in which perceptual
cues coincided with speaker cues to the verb’s
meaning. When presented with conflicting information,
or when both actions offered perceptually
salient results, children failed. This
suggests that the difficulty rests in children’s
attention to a speaker’s cues in the presence
of compelling actions and action results; young
children may only be guided by perceptual
preferences when perceptually salient actions
are available.
Maguire, Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff and Brandone
(2008) also focus on the question of word
learning, especially on two hypotheses that
suggest how children extract relations to extend
a novel verb. One of them states that seeing
many different exemplars helps children to
detect the invariant relation between actions,
whereas the other maintains that repetition of
fewer exemplars allows children to move beyond
the entities involved to extract the relation.
The results of this study support the findings
from the latter perspective: children were
significantly better at mapping and extending
novel verb label when they were shown fewer
rather than many exemplars. However, children
will need to see many more exemplars of an
action to acquire an adult-like concept of a
verb’s meaning.
As it has been already stated, nouns are generally
easier to learn than verbs, yet verbs appear
in children’s earliest vocabularies, creating
a seeming paradox. McDonough, Song, Hirsh-
Pasek, Golinkoff and Lannon (2011) propose
that perhaps the advantage nouns have is not a
function of grammatical form class but rather is
related to a word’s imageability. Words with high
136 Esdrújula. Revista de filología
imageability are easier to see as distinct separate
entities than those represented by words
with low imageability, for example verbs. They
discovered a significant relationship between
imageability and parent reported age of acquisition,
that is, words with higher imageability ratings
tend to be acquired earlier than words with
lower imageability ratings. Due to this, early
dominance of nouns may no simply be a function
of form class, rather it may have a conceptual
explanation (highly imageable words may
be easier to learn). Verbs in early vocabulary
are also imageable words often used with limited
and very specific meanings, not reflecting
the breadth of meaning adults use. So here it
is suggested again that although verbs can be
learned very early in vocabulary development,
their meaning has to evolve before they acquire
adult-likeness (Maguire et al., 2008).
It is true, as it has been showed by different
studies, that verbs seem to be more difficult
to learn than nouns because actions are more
complex and difficult to generalize than objects,
but, despite these difficulties, nouns are
not predominant and children actually acquire
and use verbs early during their vocabulary
development. However, this verb use is simpler
than the one made by adults, and only as the
child grows and acquires a wider vocabulary
will he be able to understand it completely.
Conclusion
Although a significant progress has been
made during the last years within the field of linguistics
and first language acquisition, we are
still far from a complete understanding of the
whole process by which infants link a certain
string of phonemes to a certain entity, object
or situation. New and interesting theories have
been developed during this period and, though
some of them were soon discarded, others
leaded to different paths of investigation which
may give us a definite solution to this question
in the future.