The Acquisition of Verbs and their Grammar:: The Effect of Particular Languages (Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics)

language-specific competence within the acquisitional process. Together with the focus on acquisition of the verb and its grammar research in this domain provides a fruitful basis for discussion. The maturation model of language acquisition assumes that UG becomes the language specific grammar over time and that UG is entirely available only up until the time when the native language has been completely acquired (cf. Atkinson 1992, Wexler 1999). Constructivist models that may also be opposed to theories of UG alongside with the usage- based approaches m- tioned above mostly elaborate on the early acquisition of spatial relations (e. g. Bowerman and Choi 2001, Sinha et al. 1999); however, two main hy- theses of this approach – a holistic view of universal spatial cognition and the language specific acquisition hypothesis are beyond the main scope – of this book. The book presents original contributions based on analyses of naturalistic data from eleven languages: Croatian, Dutch, English, Estonian, French, German, Hebrew, Jakarta Indonesian, Japanese, Russian and Spanish. Three of the contributions make cross-linguistic comparisons – between English and Russian; English, German and Spanish; and German, Croatian and English. All papers in the volume investigate first language acquisition and one paper studies both first and second language acquisition.

This volume investigates the linguistic development of children with regard to their knowledge of the verb and its grammar.

The selection of papers gives empirical evidence from a wide variety of languages including Hebrew, German, Croatian, Japanese, English, Spanish, Dutch, Indonesian, Estonian, Russian and French.

Findings are interpreted with a focus on cross-linguistic similarities and differences, without subscribing to either a UG-based or usage-based approach.

Currently debated topics, such as the role of frequency, as well as traditional ones such as bootstrapping are integrated into the presentation of language-specific, learner-specific and more general properties of the acquisition process.

The papers are united by their focus on discovering what determines rule-governed behavior in language learners who are coming to terms with the grammar of verbs.