Discusses a study that examines which combination of animate and inanimate actors (anyone or anything performing an action) and patients (the thing that is the object of action) two-year-olds view as prototypical. Results suggest that the actor category is usually acquired first for prototypical sentences with animate actors and inanimate…

Speculative explanation for the misapplication of adjectives for adverbs in colloquial speech, e.g., He drives good'' for He drives well.'' (RS)

Uses a quasi-experimental design to compare the social adjustment of 21 children who received the Language for Learning program with those of 24 children enrolled in a comparison school. Finds that the Language for Learning program produced statistically and educationally significant effects, including improvements in social skills and reductions…

Three experiments with children between 5 and 7 years are described. It is shown that nominal predication of an unknown word by a superordinate term enables young children to make appropriate inferences concerning its attributes. The results are discussed in relation to semantic development and reasoning in the young child. (Author/RM)

This case study of two Latvian children attempts to show how the parental terms for"mummy" and "daddy" in Latvian are acquired, paying particular attention to the changing relationship between the input and output forms during the acquisition process. (Author/RM)

A study of the utterances of young children, aged 7 to 22 months, is described. These utterances, varying in length from one to 17 syllables, contain only suprasegmental information because the verbal content was incomprehensible to hearers who were not acquainted with the child and the situation in which the utterances occured. In the corpus,…

The hypothesis explains the early lexical development of children and the predictions of this hypothesis are shown to be consistent with available data on overextension. (Author/NCR)

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)

Discusses three experiments investigating the development of word-by-word comprehension in 5-, 7-, and 10-year olds. Subjects monitored for target words in a sentence. Variable included types of monitoring tasks and distribution and context of target words. Results are discussed in terms of the types of comprehension processes various tasks…

Extensive longitudinal data were gathered on a child's entry into the symbolically mediated modal world by examining changes in the semantics and pragmatics of her uses of modal auxiliary verbs. The data are 53 transcripts of natural conversations between a girl, Nina, and her mother recorded periodically from her 23rd month to her 39th month. The…

Two investigations of the acquisition of the meaning of "always" and "never," and "always,""never,""usually,""seldom," and "sometimes" are discussed. Results demonstrate that the acquisition sequence of meanings of related words may vary among children at the beginning, but become consistent in later acquisition. (CHK)

This chapter, to be included in "Carmichael's Manual of Child Psychology," edited by P.A. Mussen, deals with the connection between the acquisition of language and the growth of intellect, and the connection between both of these and the process of maturation. The author feels that various theories of development cannot account for the child's…

To the question of whether Chomsky's hypothesized Language Acquisition Device (LAD) in young children is an adequate and feasible model of language acquisition, this paper answers that LAD should be reformulated so as to include semantics; that "informant presentation" rather than "text presentation" is responsible for language…

Children's understanding of the nature of polar terms and comparative terms between the polar opposites is discussed. (CHK)

Diary observations of two-year-olds' over-extended word use have been interpreted as arising from the word's underlying semantic feature structure. This interpretation was rejected after a study of five children. The need to construct models of early word meaning reflecting certain early language development patterns is discussed. (CHK)