Morphological cues to verb meaning: verb inflections and the initial mapping of verb meanings

The present studies investigated children's use of verb inflections to guide their initial mapping of verb meanings. Given that children initially apply the progressive -ing inflection to verbs denoting actions and the past -ed inflection to verbs denoting results of events, two studies were conducted to investigate whether children use these inflections during mapping of novel verb meanings. In both studies, subjects were taught novel verbs and were asked to extend those verbs to events in which the action or result differed from events used to teach the verbs. It was predicted that subjects would be less likely to extend verbs inflected with -ing to events with new actions and would be less likely to extend verbs inflected with -ed to events with new results. Eighteen three- and five-year-olds and 24 adults participated in Experiment 1 in a between-subjects design that produced weak effects for the youngest subjects tested. Experiment 2 tested 16 three-year-olds and 19 five-year-olds in a within-subjects design and produced the predicted effect for three-year-olds, but not for five-year-olds. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for early verb learning and regarding the use of the bootstrapping construct in language acquisition research.