A review of the state-process and punctual-nonpunctual distinctions in children's acquisitions of verbs

A secondary analysis of empirical studies of children's acquisition of verbs was undertaken to examine evidence for the state-process and punctual-nonpunctual distinctions in children's early use and under standing of verbs as postulated by Bickerton's language bioprogram hypothesis. Approximately 60 empirical studies were initially reviewed with 13 reporting findings relevant to the state-process and/or punctual- nonpunctual distinctions involving the languages of English, French, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, and Turkish. It was found that these studies in general provide considerable empirical support for the hypotheses that children universally distinguish stative from process verbs and punctual from nonpunctual verbs in the early stages of language acquisition.