Summary of references on organization of verbs in mental lexicon

[Rachel Chung]

Dear Info-Childes readers,

First of all I must thank all of you who responded to my query about
references on the organization of verbs in mental lexicon. You have been
of great help. However, I also realize that my question was not specific
enough so let me restate the question here, along with a complete list of
references.

I'm interested in a wide range of questions about verbs, but I
especially have problems in finding literature about the overall
organization of the verb lexicon, specifically, whether it's better
characterized as hierarchy or matrix. I know there've been a number of
papers on this, but they are all from at least ten years ago. Is there any
more up-to-date work?

So far I've found Miller and Fellbaum's paper in the 1991 special issue of
Cognition to be the most useful and directly relevant to my research
question, (Thanks to Pinker) although I still have a long reading list to
finish!

Below is a complete list of references, kindly provided by Ann Dowker, 
Lois Bloom, Steve Pinker, and Ping Li.

Best,
Rachel

From: Ann Dowker <ann.dowker at psy.ox.ac.uk>

M. Tomasello and W.E. Merriman: Beyond Names for Things: Young Children's
Acquisition of Verbs; Erlbaum, 1995

R.M. Golinkoff, K. Hirsch-Pasek and R. Nandakumar: Lexical principles may
underlie the learning of verbs; Child Development, 1996, 67, 3101-3119.  

From: Lois Bloom <lmb32 at columbia.edu>

A succession of studies from my research lab, published between 1975 and
1989, reported the verbs children learn, and the subcategorization of
children's verbs that determines the acquisition of different linguistic
structures for sentence procedures.

These papers, listed below, were reprinted in the volume Bloom, L. (1991).
Language development from two to three. New York: Cambridge University
Press.

Bloom, L., Lightbown, P., & Hood, L. (1975). Structure and variation in 
child language. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child 
Development, 40 (Serial No. 160).

Bloom, L., Miller, P., & Hood, L. (1975). Variation and reduction as 
aspects of competence in child language. In A. Pick (Ed.), Minnesota 
symposia on child psychology (Vol. 9, pp. 3-55). Minneapolis MN: 
University of Minnesota Press.

Bloom, L., Lifter, K., & Hafitz, J. (1980). The semantics of verbs and the 
development of verb inflections in child language. Language, 56, 386-412.

Bloom, L., Merkin, S., & Wootten, J. (1982). Wh-questions: Linguistic 
factors that contribute to the sequence of acquisition. Child Development, 
53, 1084-1092.

Bloom, L., Tackeff, J., & Lahey, M. (1984). Learning to in complement 
constructions. Journal of Child Language, 11, 391-406.

Bloom, L., Rispoli, M., Gartner, B., & Hafitz, J. (1989). Acquisition of 
complementation. Journal of Child Language, 16, 101-120. 


See also the summary and taxonomy of verbs from of many of these studies
in Bloom, L. (1981). The importance of language for language development:
Linguistic determinism in the 1980s. In H. Winitz (Ed.), Native language
and foreign language acquisition.  Annals of the New York Academy of
Sciences (Vol. 379, pp. 160-171).  

In addition, how verbs contribute to contingency in early child 
discourse was reported in Bloom, L., Rocissano, L., & Hood, 
L. (1976). Adult-child discourse: Developmental interaction between 
information processing and linguistic knowledge. Cognitive Psychology, 8, 
521-551 (also in Bloom, 1991).

From: "Jose G. Centeno" <frontier2 at mindspring.com>
Here are some references on lexical organization & processing for verbs in
adult speakers:

Centeno, J. G. (1996). Use of verb inflections in the oral expression of
agrammatic Spanish-speaking aphasics. Unpublished doctoral dissertation,
City University of New York Graduate School

Jarema, G., & Kehayia, E. (1992). Impairment of inflectional morphology and
lexical storage. Brain & Language, 43, 541-564

Nespoulous, J.-L., & Villard, P. (Eds). (1990). Morphology, Phonology, &
Aphasia. New York: Springer-Verlag

Obler, L. K., Harris, K., Meth, M., Centeno, J. G., & Matthews, P.(1999).
The phonology-morphosynatx interface.  Brain & Language, 68, 233-240.

From: Steven Pinker <spinker at mediaone.net>
Pinker, S. 1989. Learnability and cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Levin, B. & Pinker, S. (Eds.). 1991. Lexical and conceptual semantics.
(Special edition of Cognition)

From: Ping Li <pli at richmond.edu>
Rachel, I had a grant that contained the following references and you might
be able to find some relevant work for you there. Let me know if this helps.

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