Contents -- Contributors -- Introduction: Progress on the Verb Learning Front -- Part I: Prerequisites to Verb Learning: Finding the Verb -- 1 Finding the Verbs: Distributional Cues to Categories Available to Young Learners -- 2 Finding Verb Forms Within the Continuous Speech Stream -- 3 Discovering Verbs Through Multiple-Cue Integration -- Part II: Prerequisites to Verb Learning: Finding Actions in Events -- 4 Actions Organize the Infant's World -- 5 Conceptual Foundations for Verb Learning: Celebrating the Event -- 6 Precursors to Verb Learning: Infants' Understanding of Motion Events -- 7 Preverbal Spatial Cognition and Language-Specific Input: Categories of Containment and Support -- 8 The Roots of Verbs in Prelinguistic Action Knowledge -- 9 When Is a Grasp a Grasp? Characterizing Some Basic Components of Human Action Processing -- 10 Word, Intention, and Action: A Two-Tiered Model of Action Word Learning -- 11 Verbs, Actions, and Intentions -- Part III: When Action Meets Word: Children Learn Their First Verbs -- 12 Are Nouns Easier to Learn Than Verbs? Three Experimental Studies -- 13 Verbs at the Very Beginning: Parallels Between Comprehension and Input -- 14 A Unified Theory of Word Learning: Putting Verb Acquisition in Context -- 15 Who's the Subject? Sentence Structure and Verb Meaning -- Part IV: How Language Influences Verb Learning: Cross-Linguistic Evidence -- 16 Verb Learning as a Probe Into Children's Grammars -- 17 Revisiting the Noun-Verb Debate: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison of Novel Noun and Verb Learning in English-, Japanese-, and Chinese-Speaking Children -- 18 But Are They Really Verbs? Chinese Words for Action -- 19 Influences of Object Knowledge on the Acquisition of Verbs in English and Japanese -- 20 East and West: A Role for Culture in the Acquisition of Nouns and Verbs -- 21 Why Verbs Are Hard to Learn.

Author Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Y -- Z -- Subject Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W.