In Study 1, English-speaking 3- and 4-year-olds heard a novel adjective used to label one of two objects and were asked for the referent of a different novel adjective. Children were more likely to select the unlabeled object if the two adjectives appeared prenominally (e.g., "a very DAXY dog") than as predicates (e.g., "a dog that is very DAXY").…

Examined in six experiments toddlers' use of syntactic cues to learn proper names and count nouns. Found that by 24 months, both girls and boys were significantly more likely to select a labeled object if they had heard a proper name than if they had heard a count noun. At 20 months, neither girls nor boys demonstrated this effect. (Author/KB)