Chapter 11 The Influence of Visual, Auditory, and Linguistic Cues on Children’s Novel Verb Generalization Bhuvana Narasimhan, Fanyin Cheng, Patricia Davidson, Pui Fong Kan and Madison Wagner Introduction Children acquire words at an early age with apparent ease. They are able to map a novel word form onto its referent after only minimal exposure, a process known as “fast-mapping” (Carey and Bartlett 1978; Golinkoff et al. 1994). A rich and rapidly burgeoning literature has evolved to account for the factors that influence children’s patterns of verb learning and categorization including perceptual features, con- ceptual factors, functional information, linguistic context, and speaker intention, among others (Smith et al. 1992; Imai et al. 1994; Kemler-Nelson 1995; Tomasello 1995; Booth and Waxman 2002; Scott and Fisher 2009). Learning the different factors that shape the meaning of a word beyond the initial stage of fast-mapping involves a protracted process during which the child learns to identify the appro- priate range of referents to which the word applies in adult language. Based on limited prior experience with the word’s use across situational and linguistic con- texts, the child must learn to appropriately extend the use of the word to novel situations that have not been previously encountered. That children are engaged in the generalization process early in development is attested by their attempts to We gratefully acknowledge the cooperation of the Tiny Minders Preschool, Louisville Public Library, and Gateway Amusement Park in allowing us to recruit children to participate in our research, as well as the many children and parents who took part in our study at the Language, Development, and Cognition Lab. B. Narasimhan (&) Á F. Cheng Á P.F. Kan University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA e-mail: bhuvana.narasimhan@colorado.edu P. Davidson Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA M. Wagner Scripps College, Claremont, CA, USA © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 G. Sengupta et al. (eds.), Perspectives on the Architecture and Acquisition of Syntax, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4295-9_11 217 kodiguddu@gmail.com