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E. C. Tolman emphasized the purposiveness of behavior — the idea that much of our behavior is goal-directed. For instance, employees who aim for a promotion work diligently to meet their targets. Tolman argued that when classical conditioning and operant conditioning occur, the organism acquires certain expectations. In classical conditioning, a child might fear a dog because they expect it to bite. In operant conditioning, a person might consistently work overtime because they expect a...

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 27, 2025

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation tDCS of Wernicke's and Broca's Areas in Studies of Language Learning and Word Acquisition

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation tDCS of Wernicke's and Broca's Areas in Studies of Language Learning and Word Acquisition

Published on: July 13, 2019

Optimal Contexts for Verb Learning.

Sabrina Horvath¹, Sudha Arunachalam²

¹Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN.

Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups

|June 12, 2023

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Children

Keywords:

Verb learning developmental language disorder late talkers syntactic bootstrapping typical language development variability

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Last Updated: Jul 27, 2025

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation tDCS of Wernicke's and Broca's Areas in Studies of Language Learning and Word Acquisition

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Published on: July 13, 2019

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Published on: January 29, 2020

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Area of Science:

Child language acquisition
Developmental linguistics
Cognitive science

Background:

Verb learning is crucial for language development.
Difficulties in verb acquisition can impact overall language outcomes, especially for children with developmental language disorder (DLD).
Understanding factors influencing verb learning is key to supporting language development.

Purpose of the Study:

To review existing literature on children's verb acquisition.
To identify environmental factors that influence the ease or difficulty of learning new verb meanings.
To inform future research and clinical interventions.

Main Methods:

A narrative, non-systematic review of studies on verb learning in children.
Discussion of findings related to verb acquisition and representation.

Main Results:

The learning environment significantly impacts verb acquisition.
Key factors include linguistic context, label timing, variability, and frequency of exposure.
Some learning situations are more effective than others.

Conclusions:

Effective verb learning is facilitated by specific environmental conditions.
Factors such as child characteristics and verb properties influence learning.
Hypotheses for future translational and clinical research are proposed.