The present experiments demonstrate that children as young as five years old (M = 5:2) generalize beyond their input on the basis of minimal exposure to a novel argument structure construction. The novel construction that was used involved a non-English phrasal pattern: VN[subscript 1]N[subscript 2], paired with a novel abstract meaning: N[subscript 2] approaches N[subscript 1]. At the same time, we find that children are keenly sensitive to the input: they show knowledge of the construction after a single day of exposure but this grows stronger after 3 days; also, children generalize more readily to new verbs when the input contains more than one verb. (Contains 6 figures and 14 tables.)