This study employs the Specificity Principle to examine the relative impacts of external (input quantity at home and at school, number of books and reading frequency at home, teachers' degree and experience, language usage, socioeconomic status) and internal factors (children's working memory, nonverbal intelligence, learning-related…

Two-year-olds use the sentence structures verbs appear in--"subcategorization frames"--to guide verb learning. This is syntactic bootstrapping. This study probed the developmental origins of this ability. The structure-mapping account proposes that children begin with a bias toward one-to-one mapping between nouns in sentences and participant…

Compares social and private uses of language in 12 children 23 to 25 months of age. Based on videotapes of children's free play with an adult, results showed that regulatory, attentional, and informative uses of language appeared in speech addressed to another, while self-regulation, description of one's own activity, and expressive functions…