Four studies investigated how differential input affects preschoolers' abilities to learn novel color words. Found that four- and five-year olds interpreted novel words as shape terms when ostensive information was provided but as color terms when additional information, contrastive or inclusive, was given. Three-year olds generally did not make…

In two studies, two year olds learned a novel word for a particular stuffed animal. When the animal was familiar, children interpreted the novel word as a proper noun. When the animal was unfamiliar, children frequently interpreted the novel word as a count noun referring to a kind of object. (BC)

Discusses three perspectives (linguistic, philosophical, and psychological) which emphasize the points of agreement rather than disagreement among different versions of a conceptually based theory of word meaning acquisition. (JMB)

This study employs a lexical-decision task to investigate second- and fourth-grade children's use of semantic context in word recognition. Results showed that younger and poorer readers benefit at least as much from semantic context in word recognition as do older and better readers. (Author/JMB)

Semantic and cognitive factors governing passive-voice comprehension were studied in kindergarten, first-, and second-grade children. (ST)

Preschool children judged the larger of pairs of stimuli. Three-year olds responded with above-chance accuracy, while 4- and 5-year olds defined "big" as "tall." (ST)

While investigating a novel toy, infants heard a novel label applied to the toy by a speaker seated within the infant's view and attending to the toy (coupled condition) or by a speaker outside the infant's view (decoupled condition). Found that infants registered a link between the label and toy in the coupled but not the decoupled condition. (BC)

Assesses whether 30 children aged three-five years had a preferred direction in responding to "when"-questions and whether this preference could be influenced by story structure. Results indicated that children showed a preference for "after"-type responses and that productions of "before" were more likely to be…

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)

First and fifth graders' incidental free and cued recall were tested after an orienting task in which semantic and acoustic encoding were constrained for different words by requiring the children to answer questions about either the words' meanings or sounds. (Author/JMB)

Children exhibiting a referential orientation seem more likely to acquire new object names than nonreferentially oriented children. Also, children's selection of words may be influenced by the phonological structure of the words. (Author/RH)

Two predictions based on H. Clark's and E. Clark's hypotheses of the acquisition of word meanings were tested: (1) when learning words which have both spatial and temporal meanings, children will understand the spatial meanings first, and (2) children understand the positive member of an antonym word pair before they understand the negative…

In two experiments, preschoolers interpreted a novel count noun applied to an unfamiliar stuffed animal as referring to a basic-level (such as a person or a dog) kind of object rather than to a context (such as a passenger) or a life-phase (such as a puppy) kind of object. (MDM)

A series of experiments revealed that noun-category bias in children's word learning is present as early as two years of age. Findings indicate that, when children interpret the meaning of novel nouns, they do not sample randomly from the range of possible meanings but focus instead on category relations. (RH)

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)