Fast-mapping and Reorganization: Development of Verb Meanings as a System

This paper explores the process through which children sort out relations among verbs belonging to the same semantic domain. For this purpose, we studied how Chinese 3-, 5-, 7year-olds and adults apply various carry/hold verbs to videos depicting 13 different carrying/holding actions. Results show that the degree of convergence between children's verb use and that of adults' are very different for different verb. Furthermore, when convergence with adult meaning was adopted as the index of whether “children have acquired the word meaning”, the key predictor of “acquisition” was the degree of semantic overlap with verbs belonging to the same semantic domain, while word frequency was the key predictor which contributed the most for verbs that children produced frequently. These results underscore the importance of examining the mechanism of reorganization of word meaning to obtain a full picture of lexical development.