Syntactic categories III

Abstract Like Chapter 9, this chapter leverages a link between a syntactic category and a nonlinguistic conceptual category to demonstrate early knowledge of the former. In this case, the categories at issue are verbs and events (given that verbs tend to name event concepts). The chapter discusses various experiments (using different methodologies) that attempt to demonstrate a link between verbs and events in progressively younger children. After addressing some important methodological differences between the preferential-looking and habituation-switch paradigms, the chapter ultimately concludes that 18-month-olds are sensitive to the verb-event link, suggesting knowledge of the synactic category V(erb) by at least that age.