Showed English- and Japanese-speaking 3-year-olds novel objects named with either known nouns referring to items similar in shape or material and color, or novel nouns. Found that with known nouns, children attended to shape when names referred to a shape-organized category, but not when names referred to a category organized by other properties.…

This paper reports evidence from a longitudinal study in which children's attention to shape in a laboratory task of artificial noun learning was correlated with a rate shift in noun acquisitions. Eight children were tested in the laboratory at 3-week intervals beginning when they had less than 25 nouns in their productive vocabulary (M age=17…

Used a modification of Akhtar, Carpenter, and Tomasello's (1996) task involving interpretation of novel nouns to test whether 18- to 28-month-olds' smart word learning derived from general attention and memory processes rather than knowledge about the communicative intents of others. Findings similar to those of Akhtar and colleagues suggest that…

Two studies explored the hypothesis that young children perceive integrally some stimuli that older children perceive separably. In both experiments, kindergarten, second- and fifth-grade children were required to classify sets of stimuli that varied in size and brightness. (SB)

Examines how reference points for the categorical interpretation of high and low (adjectives) were defined by three- to five-year-old children and adults. Shows categorical interpretations of relative terms to be complex dependent. (HOD)

Errors in naming pictures were studied for 12 children followed from age 15 months to 22 months and for 60 children of similar ages at three different levels of vocabulary development. An increase in naming errors was found with sudden increases in productive vocabulary, suggesting interference from previously retrieved words. (SLD)

Ten language impaired and 10 language normal children, aged 3-5), were asked to solve verbal and nonverbal problems requiring color and size judgments. There were no group differences on the verbal tasks, but the language impaired children performed less well on the nonverbal tasks especially on problems dealing with size. (Author/DB)

Responds to four commentaries on the article by Jones and Smith in this issue. Suggests that the comments derive from the possibility that stable concepts might not exist and from the difficulty of imagining what cognition could be without represented concepts. Discusses traditional approaches to stability and variability, and considers what…

A longitudinal study examined the role of a mapping system in 2-year olds' learning of color and size words. Results indicated that the children acquired color maps in a characteristic order and showed a different acquisition pattern for size words. Results suggest that learning word associations may promote color-word acquisition; learning color…

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…

Clarifies features of Smith et al.'s attentional learning account of object naming, arguing that Booth and Waxman's findings address tenets not in the attentional learning account while not addressing one of the central tenets of the attentional learning account. Suggests that the debate about the nature of children's language and cognition would…

The contrast between holistic and differentiated perception of multidimensional stimuli is reconceptualized. Hypotheses about the experiential status of dimensions within holistic perception were tested as explanations of children's general perceptual mode and of adults' integral mode. Three levels of dimensional status are described. (Author/RD)

Six experiments involving 279 2- to 5-year-old children, 52 undergraduates, and 16 adults examined the interaction of perception and language in the development of magnitude marking of size, loudness, and achromatic color. Results suggest converging interactions between perception and language for size and loudness and antagonistic interactions…

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…

Two experiments explore children's spontaneous labeling of novel objects as a method to study early lexical access. The experiments also provide new evidence on children's attention to object shape when labeling objects. In Experiment 1, the spontaneous productions of 21 23- to 28-month-olds (mean 26;28) shown a set of novel, unnamed objects were…