Investigates the ability of 32 two-year-old children to use syntactic (i.e., form class) and semantic (i.e., type of referent) information to interpret the meaning of new nouns. Subjects were taught either a common noun or a proper noun for a block-like or animal-like object and then asked to select the named toy. (Author/CB)

The study with 10 agrammatic aphasic (Broca) adults examined their difficulties using determiners in sentence comprehension. Results included the findings that printed rather than spoken presentation yielded significant improvement for the proper noun/common noun distinction, and that performance was poorer for the mass noun/count noun…

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) and their normally developing (ND) peers imitated proper nouns, the pronouns "he" and "you," and the article "the" in subject phrases. Both groups showed significantly more omissions of the function words than the proper nouns. A phonological explanation of subject article and pronoun omission is…

Between their second and fifth years, young children learn approximately 15 new words a day. For every word the child hears, he or she must choose the correct referent out of an infinite set of candidates. An important problem for developmental psychologists is to understand the principles that limit the child's hypotheses about word meanings. A…

Two strategies that children use to figure out new word meanings--attention to linguistic form class and the assumption of lexical contrast--were examined. It was found that very young children use both form class and lexical contrast to interpret new words. (PCB)

In two experiments 96 children and eight adults were tested for comprehension of the modifier-head relation in compounds such as apple-knife or were asked to label objects with compounds. Results show that by age three children reliably interpret novel compounds and made use of novel compounds to subcategorize. (RH)

Evaluation of the grammatical morphology used by 50 preschool children with specific language impairment as a function of their lexical diversity found their use of finite-verb morphology (based on number of different verbs used) and noun-related morphology lagged behind expectations in comparison to a group of normally developing preschoolers.…

Re-examination of data on noun-verb pair comprehension and production in Australian and American Sign Language confirm the existence of formationally related noun-verb pairs in Auslan in which the verb displays a single movement and the noun displays a repeated movement. Overall, the derivational process appears closely linked to an iconic base…

Analyzes results of four experiments using noun category and thematic stimuli and suggests that the associative structures of memory help constrain and mediate retrieval search for stimulus information. Also, that these structures as well as representations of the stimulus events in memory seem to differ for thematic and category events, and for…

A six-year-old nonvocal girl with autism who had acquired a variety of signs and imitative responses consistently failed to acquire a tact (labeling) repertoire. When procedures to transfer stimulus control from verbal to nonverbal stimuli were implemented, the subject quickly learned to tact all 18 target stimuli. (Author/DB)

Fifteen children (grades 3-5) with specific language impairment (SLI) were asked to define 10 common nouns. Children with SLI scored significantly lower than children with typically developing language for both content and form. Results suggest that lexical access and/or lack of metalinguistic knowledge were potential causes for the lower scores…

Students, ages 12, 15, 18, and 23 (n=60 per group), wrote definitions for 16 abstract nouns. Responses were analyzed for Aristotelian style. There was an increasing tendency for students to mention the appropriate category to which a word belongs, core features of the word, and subtle aspects of meaning. (DB)

A study of the cognitive processes involved in achieving coherence in discourse examined a major factor affecting the accessibility of referents: the length of absence of the referent from the distribution of different types of grammatical referential devices (definite nouns and anaphoric pronouns) in discourse. Six versions of a set of twenty…

Adjective noun-noun word triplets were presented in an acquisition encoding context to second and fourth graders and college students to determine if they were compatible with trace information in memory and change with age. (HOD)

Two experiments with a total of 17 adolescents or adults with severe mental retardation evaluated the potential of exclusion procedures (selection of an undefined object in comparison with a defined object) as a means of training basic naming skills. Reliable exclusion and naming performance were demonstrated in nearly all subjects. (DB)