Bilingualism and Developmental Linguistics research group

Speaker: Sudha Arunachalam (New York University)

Title: It’s not a party without cake: Children’s acquisition of nouns that denote events

Abstract: Most language acquisition research on word learning addresses either nouns that denote objects or verbs that denote events. I will present experimental data on the acquisition of a cross-cutting category: nouns that denote events (e.g., party, nap). In three experiments, I will argue that (a) English-acquiring preschool-aged children have some knowledge of these words, but that they may still have incorrect representations for them, (b) they can use particular kinds of linguistic cues to help them learn these, and (c) event nominal learning in this respect more closely resembles what we know about verb acquisition than what we know about noun acquisition.