By contrast, given what they communicate – causality, agency, manner, etc., often all at once – learning to use verb arguments involves the task of discriminating semantic relationships that are multidimensional, that are distributed across different items that arguments comprise, and that are likely far more semantically abstract than anything considered earlier.
Again pointing to the greater complexity of verbs.
Thus unlike nouns and names, which can be characterized as being learned as classes of lexical items, verbs are different. Verb learning seems to be best characterized in terms of the acquisition of classes of arguments (patterns of relations between lexical items), because an aspect of verbs that is relatively invariant across contexts is their relationship to the arguments they occur in.
Thinking about a possible connection here to other findings that verbs are harder to learn than nouns.
This account makes clear predictions in regard to them: if learners are exposed to sets of geometrically distributed forms, they should acquire models of their probabilities that better approximate one another than when learning from other distributions. Conversely, if learning from geometric distributions does not produce convergence, it would suggest the probabilistic account of communication described here (indeed, any probabilistic account of communication) is false.Footnote
An important formulation of this argument that is testable.
although the memory advantage of John relies on its frequency, the memorability of Cornelius also benefits from this: Cornelius is easier to remember if the system contains fewer names (also, as discussed earlier, if John is easier to say than Cornelius, this will reduce the average effort of name articulation)
A good example of the balance between discrimination and learnability
By contrast, because regularity entails less discriminability, learners’ representations of lexico-morphological neighbourhoods will tend to be more generic, which causes the forms of large numbers of less frequent items to be learned implicitly, compensating for the incompleteness of individual experience.
Really interesting argument -- I think what this is saying is that implicit statistical learning is actually enabled and enhanced by irregular word forms
more concrete and imageable concepts do so directly, more abstract concepts do so by metaphorical extension
This seems to have held up pretty well according to my understanding of research on the concrete vs. abstract words in word learning.
Mind is not the brain alone. Cognition is not just ‘in the head’; it extends well beyond the skull and the skin. Non-Cartesian Cognitive Science views cognition as being embodied, environmentally embedded, autopoietically enacted, and socially encultured and distributed.
This is the basis that Annie Murphy Paul's book "Extended Mind" is founded on.
Hopper (1998) describes grammar as the “sediment of usage”
A wonderfully pithy quote that reminds me of Daniel T. Willingham's "memory is the residue of thought."