Flexibility in Early Verb Use: Evidence from a Multiple-N Diary Study

Flexibility and productivity are hallmarks of humanlanguage use. Competent speakers have the capacity to usethe words they know to serve a variety of communicativefunctions, to refer to new and varied exemplars of thecategories to which words refer, and in new and variedcombinations with other words. When and how childrenachieve this flexibility–and when they are truly productivelanguage users–are central issues among accounts oflanguage acquisition. The current study tests competinghypotheses of the achievement of flexibility and somekinds of productivity against data on children’s first usesof their first-acquired verbs. Eight mothers recordedtheir children’s first 10 uses of 34 early-acquired verbs, if those verbs were produced within the window of thestudy. The children were between 16 and 20 monthswhen the study began (depending on when the childrenstarted to produce verbs), were followed for between3 and 12 months, and produced between 13 and 31 of thetarget verbs. These diary records provided the basis fora description of the pragmatic, semantic, and syntacticproperties of early verb use. The data revealed that withinthis early, initial period of verb use, children use theirverbs both to command and describe, they use their verbsin reference to a variety of appropriate actions enactedby a variety of actors and with a variety of affectedobjects, and they use their verbs in a variety of syntacticstructures. All 8 children displayed semantic andgrammatical flexibility before 24 months of age. Thesefindings are more consistent with a model of the languagelearningchild as an avid generalizer than as a conservativelanguage user. Children’s early verb use suggests abilities and inclinations to abstract from experience that may indeed begin in infancy.