This report on research in progress explores criteria for lexical innovation in children. Children, like adults, make use of a principle of conventionality (each word has one or more conventional meanings) and one of contrast (the conventional meanings of every two words contrast). Like adults, children coin words to fill lexical gaps, and they do…

Research supported in part by a National Science Foundation Grant. (VM)

To the question of whether Chomsky's hypothesized Language Acquisition Device (LAD) in young children is an adequate and feasible model of language acquisition, this paper answers that LAD should be reformulated so as to include semantics; that "informant presentation" rather than "text presentation" is responsible for language…

This study tested the hypothesis that children as young as two years use what adults tell them about meaning relations when making inferences about new words. Subjects (n=18) learned two new terms, with instructions to treat one term as superordinate to the other or replace one with the other, and with no instructions. Children used both kinds of…

A discussion of language acquisition assumes that lexicon plays a central role, and that the principles of conventionality and contrast are also essential. It examines the hypotheses children draw on about possible word meanings and how they map their meanings into forms. This process begins with children's emerging knowledge of conventional words…

Children's self-monitoring of language production, as it is reflected in spontaneous speech repair, was studied. Recordings of the speech of three children aged two to three were analyzed for spontaneous phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic repairs. After tabulation, repairs were identified as "for the listener"…