Four experiments investigated 4-year-olds' understanding of adjective-noun compositionality and their sensitivity to statistics when interpreting scalar adjectives. In Experiments 1 and 2, children selected "tall" and "short" items from 9 novel objects called "pimwits" (1-9 in. in height) or from this array plus 4 taller or shorter distractor…

Two experiments examined the development of recollection (recalling qualitative details about an event) and familiarity (recognizing the event) using the dual-process signal detection model. In Experiment 1 (n = 117; ages 6, 8, 10, 14, and 18 years), recollection improved from childhood to adolescence after semantic encoding but not after…

Lexical priming was assessed in children with reading disability (RD) and in age-matched controls (M= 11.5 years), in visual and auditory lexical decision tasks. In the visual task, children with RD were found to have deficits in semantic (SHIP-BOAT), phonological/graphemic (GOAT-BOAT), and combined (FLOAT-BOAT) priming. The same pattern of…

Study demonstrates that children, like adults, do have lower tachistoscopic recognition thresholds for good than for bad words. (Authors)

Briefly desctibes (1) the abstraction theory of word meaning acquisition and (2) three distinguishable versions of a conceptually based approach to the acquisition of word meaning. (JMB)

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)

Children in grades 1 to 8 were given picture-word pairs and were asked to say whether the items rhymed, in a sound task, or "went together," in a meaning task. It was concluded that children can get meaning from printed words without the use of an intermediate phonemic code. (Author/JMB)

Three- to 5-year olds heard two novel labels each applied to the same novel object. About half the children accepted both labels, thereby overriding mutual exclusivity. About half the children honored mutual exclusivity by accepting only one of the labels. (BC)

Contrary to earlier assertions, young children do not interpret the word different to mean same. Both 2 1/2-year-old children and adults interpret requests for same or different objects appropriately, apparently following conventions of conversational discourse. These data offer no support for a discrete semantic-feature model of acquiring word…

Preschool children were tested for their understanding of the words "more" and "less" in a comprehension condition and a construction condition. (Author/JMB)

Discusses two experiments concerning the generality of shape bias in two and three year olds. The experiments were intended to provide new information about shape bias in children's novel word extensions. Results suggest that very young children possess considerable knowledge about conditional relations between kinds of perceptual properties. (GLR)

Data from four recent language studies are examined to explore issues in concept-word relationships. Issues considered include: lexical development, bases of application, single-word functions, semantic domains, categorizing through naming, and concept matching as a model of word learning. (JMB)

Argues that inferring the intension (meaning) of children's words solely from the words' extension (referential scope) is problematic and describes two studies of the intension of children's words which involve a different approach. (JMB)

Children in grades 1, 3, and 5 were asked to decide whether selected contradictory sentences were true or false. The age at which children were first able to evaluate the false sentences correctly corresponded to the relative speed with which adults evaluated the sentences in a timed vertification task. (Author/JMB)