Verb vocabularies are shaped by complex meanings from the onset of development.

Abstract

Verbs and nouns vary in many ways - including in how they are used in language and in the timing of their early learning. We compare the distribution of semantic features that comprise early-acquired verb and noun meanings. Given overall semantic and syntactic differences between nouns and verbs, we hypothesized that the preference for directly perceptible features observed for nouns would be attenuated for verbs. Building on prior work using semantic features and semantic networks in nouns, we find that compared to early-learned nouns (N = 359), early-learned verbs (N = 103) have meanings disproportionately built from complex information inaccessible to the senses. Further, children's early verb vocabularies (N = 3,804) show semantic relationships strongly shaped by this complex information from the beginning of vocabulary development. Complexity is observed in early verb meanings and is reflected in the vocabularies of children even at the outset of verb learning.