Biography
Biography: Jean Mandler
Abstract
There is a paradox in early language acquisition. Infants are fascinated by motion; there is abundant evidence that they are far more interested in motion than in static objects. This would lead us to expect that motion verbs would figure prominently in their early vocabularies. Yet infants routinely learn and use object nouns before they learn verbs, even motion verbs. The problem is that verbs are complex and harder to learn than the names of objects, so infants find other ways to refer to motion prior to acquiring verbs. For example, they use prepositions such as up and down, to refer to things moving up and down, andsocial terms such as ‘hi’ and ‘bye’, to refer tocoming in and going out. Examples are given, showing how infants manage to express what most interests them.