Acquisition of Desires before Beliefs: A Computational Investigation

The acquisition of Belief verbs lags behind the acquisition of Desire verbs in children. Some psycholinguistic theories attribute this lag to conceptual differences between the two classes, while others suggest that syntactic differences are responsible. Through computational experiments, we show that a probabilistic verb learning model exhibits the pattern of acquisition, even though there is no difference in the model in the difficulty of the semantic or syntactic properties of Belief vs. Desire verbs. Our results point to the distributional properties of various verb classes as a potentially important, and heretofore unexplored, factor in the observed developmental lag of Belief verbs.