The English plural is about the "number" of "individuals" in a "set" of "like kinds." Two-year-old children use the plural but do not do so in all obligatory contexts. The present report asks whether the limitations on their production of the plural are related to aspects of meaning. In two Experiments plural productions were elicited from…

This paper reports on partial knowledge in two-year-old children's learning of the regular English plural. In Experiments 1 and 2, children were presented with one kind and its label and then were either presented with two of that same kind (A[right arrow]AA) or the initial picture next to a very different thing (A[right arrow]AB). The children in…

In the novel noun generalization task, 2 1/2-year-old children display generalized expectations about how solid and nonsolid things are named, extending names for never-before-encountered solids by shape and for never-before-encountered nonsolids by material. This distinction between solids and nonsolids has been interpreted in terms of an…

Two experiments examined differences in the early noun learning of English- and Japanese-speaking children. Found that English-speaking children's vocabularies were heavily lopsided with many more object than animal names, whereas Japanese-speaking children's vocabularies were more evenly balanced. Results suggested that early learners of English…

Offers additional means of evaluating parent speech by examining frequencies of individual nouns, verbs, and descriptors, and examining the learning task presented to children. Study one examines transcripts from the CHILDES database of English-speaking parents' speech to children at five developmental levels; study two examines 50 transcripts of…