This study examined word meanings in the single word period of language learning. Ten children were seen for 5 hours each month from the time they started learning language until their median length of utterance was 2.5 words. All the children's utterances, and the extralinguistic contexts of the utterances, such as objects and movements, were…

Children's acquisition of the mass-count distinction in English was investigated. In order to determine whether children approach the distinction as a morphosyntactic or a semantic distinction, 88 monolingual children aged 3-9 years were asked to judge the acceptability of 32 sentences containing "much" or "many" with 8 types of nominals. The…

Theories of the acquisition of word meaning among children are reviewed and a case study of one child is reported. Three models of how the young child associates words with underlying concepts and conventional meanings are noted. While one model proposes that children initially overextend word meanings, the other two models propose that new words…

The meaning of children's lexical innovations is distinguished from the forms they rely on to convey meaning. Children require knowledge of the context in order to judge how the meaning of their innovation can be conveyed to the addressee. This contextualization is often achieved by default, since children tend to limit their early conversations…

A child acquiring a language must learn to correctly match the phenomena of the realworld which he perceives with the lexical items and the segregates and perhaps some of the grammatical categories of the language to be learned. He must correlatively learn the organization in meaning of and among these last named elements, that is, the internal…

The acquisition of "to" in infinitive complement structure was examined in the spontaneous speech data from four children who were observed longitudinally from two to three years of age. Results support the conclusion that the verb system is a determining factor in the acquisition of linguistic structure. (SED)

Critical evaluation of Schlesinger's theory of language acquisition as expounded in Production of Utterances and Language Acquisition'' in The Ontogenesis of Grammar'', p63-101, New York: Academic Press, 1971. (RS)

It was determined that suprasegmental features effect the ability of very young children (3 years) to decide whether strings of words are to be treated as sentences or nonsentences, whereas for adults and older children grammatical cues alone suffice. (FWB)

Presents a study of young children's understanding that pronouns and proper names cannot be modified by pronominal adjectives. Some nonsyntactic theories are discussed that support the claim that children understand knowledge of word order through the rules that order abstract linguistic categories. (31 references) (GLR)

Examines the understanding of the pragmatic function of mental terms ("think,""know,""guess") to express the relative certainty of 69 children aged 3-11. Results showed an improvement with age for the "know-think" and "know-guess" contrasts, but no improvement with age for the…

Results of four experiments suggest that two-year-olds may be capable of forming inclusion relations when they hear a novel word for an object that already has a familiar name. (PCB)

The paper examines the first twenty verb-forms recorded for six Hebrew-speaking children aged between 1;2 and 2;1, and how they evolve into fully inflected verbs for three of these children. Discussion focuses first on what word-forms children initially select for the verbs they produce, what role these forms play in children's emergent grammar,…

In our recent paper, "Semantic generality, input frequency and the acquisition of syntax" ("Journal of Child Language" 31, 61-99), we presented data from two-year-old children to examine the question of whether the semantic generality of verbs contributed to their ease and stage of acquisition over and above the effects of their typically high…

Although Mandarin Chinese is a topic-prominent language, it is shown that young children acquiring Chinese as their first language access the concept of grammatical subject as well as that of topic. A total of 95 children aged 2-5 years acquiring Mandarin Chinese as their first language were tested on sentences involving equi-constructions. It was…