This study investigates the influence of semantic maturation on early lexical development by examining the impact of contextual diversity--known to influence semantic development--on word promotion from receptive to productive vocabularies (i.e., comprehension-expression gap). Study 1 compares the vocabularies of 3685 American-English-speaking…

Previous work has shown that toddlers readily encode each noun in the sentence as a distinct argument of the verb. However, languages allow multiple mappings between form and meaning that do not fit this canonical format. Two experiments examined French 28-month-olds' interpretation of right-dislocated sentences ("noun"-verb,…

Discusses the acquisition of verb meaning based on the premise that there is a fundamental difference between the relational meanings expressed by verbs and the referential meanings expressed by simple nouns. (JMB)

Three experiments presented nonsense verbs to two-year-olds either in syntactic isolation or embedded within a transitive syntactic frame. Found that children had identifiable action biases in the absence of syntactic information and that these biases were shifted by the addition of a transitive syntactic frame. (MDM)

The importance of actions, results, and instruments in the development of verb concepts was examined in four studies. Studies are discussed in terms of theory and research on conceptual development, word learning strategies, and the semantic organization of nouns and verbs. (PCB)

Samples of the language used by 4 children were recorded longitudinally between 1.5 and 3 years of age. Children's expressions of motion were categorized into expressions involving a source, path, or goal of motion. There were developmental changes, including an increase in the use of words relating to goals as children grew older. (BC)