Maps for Verbs: The Relation Between Interaction Dynamics and Verb Use

We report a study of word meaning that tests whether dynamical aspects of movies predict word use. The movies were based on a novel representation of verb semantics called maps for verbs. We asked preschool-school-age children to describe the movies, and demonstrated that their distributions of words could be predicted by the dynamical aspects of the movies. These results lend support to the empiricist position that word meanings are learned associatively.