Verbs Matter: A Tutorial for Determining Verb Difficulty.

PURPOSE: Research indicates that when teaching grammatical forms to children, the verbs used to model specific grammatical inflections matter. When learning grammatical forms, children have higher performance when they hear many unique verb forms that vary in their frequency and phonological complexity. In this tutorial, we demonstrate a method for identifying and characterizing a large number of verbs based on their frequency and complexity. METHOD: We selected verbs from an open-access database of transcribed child language samples. We extracted verbs produced by 5- to 8.9-year-old children in four morphosyntactic contexts: regular past tense -ed, third person singular -s, is/are + verb+ing, and do/does questions. We ranked verbs based on their frequency of occurrence across transcripts. We also coded the phonological complexity of each verb. We coded each verb as high or low frequency and high or low phonological complexity. RESULTS: The synthesis yielded 129 unique verbs used in the regular past tense -ed context, 107 verbs used in the third person singular -s context, 69 verbs used in the is/are + verb+ing context, and 16 verbs used in the do/does question context. We created tables for each form that include the frequency rankings and phonological complexity scores for every verb. CONCLUSIONS: Clinicians may use the verb lists, frequency ratings, and phonological complexity scores to help identify verbs to incorporate into assessment and intervention sessions with children. Researchers and clinicians may use the step-by-step approach presented in the tutorial to identify verbs or other syntactic components used in different morphosyntactic contexts or produced by individuals of different demographics in different speaking contexts.

Smaller on the left? Flexible association between space and magnitude in pigeons (Columba livia) and blue jays (Cyanocitta cristata).

Humans and other apes represent magnitudes spatially, demonstrated by their responding faster and more accurately to one side of space when presented with small quantities and to the other side of space when presented with large quantities. This representation is flexible and shows substantial variability between cultural groups in humans and between and within individuals in great apes. In contrast, recent findings suggest that chicks show a spatial representation of magnitude that is highly lateralized and inflexible, implying a qualitatively different underlying representation than in primates. Using methods similar to those used with great apes and humans, we trained adult domestic pigeons (Columba livia) and blue jays (Cyanocitta cristata) to select the smaller (or larger) of two nonadjacent quantity arrays; later, this task was reversed. At test, birds were presented with novel probe pairs consisting of adjacent quantity pairs (e.g., 2 vs. 3). Both species showed robust evidence for a flexible spatial representation of magnitude with considerable individual variability in the orientation of this representation. These results are not consistent with an inflexible, lateralized, left-to-right representation of magnitude in birds, but are consistent with the flexible spatial representation of magnitude observed in apes and humans. We conclude that the tendency to organize quantities spatially may be a fundamental and evolutionarily ancient feature of cognition that is widespread among vertebrates. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).