Two experiments were performed on the ability of children and adults to understand and produce locative verbs. Results confirm that children tend to make syntactic errors with sentences containing "fill" and "empty," encoding the content argument as direct object. (33 references) (JL)

Examined how object shape, taxonomic relatedness, and prior lexical knowledge influenced children's overextensions (e.g., referring to pomegranates as apples). Researchers presented items that disentangled the three factors and used a novel comprehension task where children could indicate negative exemplars. Error patterns differed by task and by…