English- and Japanese-speaking children aged four and five were asked to say the opposite of statements. Statements varied in truth value and unmarked/marked membership of antonym pairs. Findings did not support a universality hypothesis; differences were found between the two groups in the use of semantic and syntactic denial. (Author/CB)

Studied bilingual children and children learning a second language using a picture-word interference task. The printed distractors interfered with naming both on trials where the distractor and naming language were the same and on trials where they were different. These and other results question whether an "input switch" operates for bilingual…

The study investigated the communicative effectiveness of word order in preschoolers' comprehension of meaning using simple questions and commands in an at-home play context. (ST)

Japanese and American children participated in a free word association experiment. Results indicated that culture was influential in the formation of language. (ST)

Analysis indicates that both 5 and 7-year-old children are capable of distinguishing between anomalous and meaningful sentences although 7-year-olds demonstrate greater awareness of selection restriction rules. (Authors)

Preschool- and kindergarten-age children's understanding of the distinct referential properties of collective and class nouns and the relationship between this understanding and performance in part-whole comparison tasks was examined in three experiments. Results indicate children understand the relationship between nouns and the sets to which…

Seeks to determine (1) whether 11- and 13-month-old infants directed their eye fixations to the referent of an object word said by the mother, and (2) whether there was a developmental shift in responding to object words at these two ages. Controls were set for response bias, stimulus preference, and maternal cuing. (Author/RH)

Four experiments examined three- and four-year olds' interpretations of novel words applied to familiar objects in the sentence frame "This Y is X," where X is a novel word and Y is a familiar count noun. Results indicated that preschoolers understood that the novel words were either proper names or adjectives/mass nouns. (MDM)

Compares two types of semantic development (the acquisition of disappearance words and success-failure words) to performance on two types of cognitive tasks (object-permanence and means-ends tasks) among infants. (HOD)

Results indicate that the semantic constraints revealed by adult associative sentences used here are a functional part of the linguistic knowledge a 5-year-old child brings to the task of memorizing sentences. (Authors)

Results appear to indicate that the belief systems of the young child about the attributes of a stimulus person can be altered extensively by introducing characteristics completely unrelated to these attributes into the semantic representation of that person. (Authors)

Tests the hypotheses that superiority of semantic over phonetic encoding increases with age, and that the superiority of multiple-dimension encoding over single-dimension encoding emerges with age. Elementary, secondary, and graduate students judged words on various dimensions of the semantic differential in an incidental memory task. (Author/SS)

A sample of 80 first- and second-grade children selected to represent four levels of reading competence were tested in their recognition of semantic, syntactic, and lexical change in sentences previously decoded during prose reading. (JMB)

Two experiments compared the abilities of third and sixth graders and adults to recognize sarcasm given context and intonation cues. Children recognized sarcasm only when given a speaker's sarcastic intonation cue, even when context strongly indicated a nonliteral interpretation. (BC)

Results indicate that curvilinear trend in children's understanding of word "big" is not obtained in all stimulus contexts. This suggests that meaning and use of "big" is complex, and may not refer simply to larger objects in a set. Proposes that meaning of "big" constitutes a dynamic system driven by many perceptual,…