Words, words, words

Traditional accounts of vocabulary acquisition assume that children succeed by aligning the utterance of words with their environmental contingencies, a word-to-world pairing. Experimental results suggest that such a procedure accounts for the acquisition of nouns but is insufficient for the acquisition of verbs. It is demonstrated that infants under two years of age systematically recruit the structural properties of sentences in which novel verbs occur to find their meanings: a sentence-to-world pairing procedure.