出版社：Faculdade de Psicologia, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul
摘要：Miller and Fellbaum (1991) propose that generic verbs are more basic and of
earlier occurrence than specific ones. This study verified the specificity as a
determining factor in the acquisition of verbs in Brazilian children. The corpus
of 146 answers of 2:0 to 5:11 year-old children and 75 undergraduate students,
emitted to each of the 17 short films which compose the Actions Naming Task, was
analyzed regarding the verbs validity and specificity. The number of valid
answers and specific verbs increased significantly with age, confirming that age
and gender are predicting factors of the use of specific verbs. The results
suggest that the lexical development of Brazilian children is related to their
categorization capacity, as they use firstly generic verbs for different
situations. With experience and exposition to the linguistic input, they acquire
more complex semantic characteristics which lead the usage of more specific
verbs.
