Flexibility and productivity are hallmarks of human
language use. Competent speakers have the capacity to use
the words they know to serve a variety of communicative
functions, to refer to new and varied exemplars of the
categories to which words refer, and in new and varied
combinations with other words. When and how children
achieve this flexibility--and when they are truly productive
language users--are central issues among accounts of
language acquisition. The current study tests competing
hypotheses of the achievement of flexibility and some
kinds of productivity against data on children’s first uses
of their first-acquired verbs. Eight mothers recorded
their children’s first 10 uses of 34 early-acquired verbs,
if those verbs were produced within the window of the
study. The children were between 16 and 20 months
when the study began (depending on when the children
started to produce verbs), were followed for between
3 and 12 months, and produced between 13 and 31 of the
target verbs. These diary records provided the basis for
a description of the pragmatic, semantic, and syntactic
properties of early verb use. The data revealed that within
this early, initial period of verb use, children use their
verbs both to command and describe, they use their verbs
in reference to a variety of appropriate actions enacted
by a variety of actors and with a variety of affected
objects, and they use their verbs in a variety of syntactic
structures. All 8 children displayed semantic and
grammatical flexibility before 24 months of age. These
findings are more consistent with a model of the languagelearning
child as an avid generalizer than as a conservative
language user. Children’s early verb use suggests abilities
and inclinations to abstract from experience that may indeed begin in infancy.
