Parent Input and Verb Lexicon Growth

This study examines the nature of lexical verb use in parent input in three groups of children with different patterns of verb lexicon growth. Previous input studies have suggested that children's lexical development is related to parent input, whereas input effects on grammatical development remain unclear. In addition, very little is known about how parental lexical verb input contributes to differences in children's verb lexicon growth. In this study, we investigated the difference in the quantity and diversity of lexical verb input directed to children who had different patterns of verb lexicon growth. Additional analyses were conducted on verb-related structural cues such as argument structure completeness, syntactic frame diversity and morphological context diversity. Parents of 18 toddlers (13 males) who had verb lexicons of less than or equal to 10 verbs at 21 months of age were divided into three groups according to their patterns of verb lexicon growth between 21 to 27 months of age. No group differences were found in the parents' lexical verb use in conversational samples with their 21-month-old toddlers. Parents were similar in their lexical verb quantity and lexical verb diversity, and they used verb-related structural cues with lexical verbs in similar ways. In light of the non-significant findings, methodological limitations of the study are discussed. Future studies could investigate the relative contribution of child gender, children's vocabulary development, and parent input measures to subsequent children's verb lexicon outcomes in a larger, less restricted sample using regression analyses.Ope