Four experiments investigated 4-year-olds' understanding of adjective-noun compositionality and their sensitivity to statistics when interpreting scalar adjectives. In Experiments 1 and 2, children selected "tall" and "short" items from 9 novel objects called "pimwits" (1-9 in. in height) or from this array plus 4 taller or shorter distractor…

Prior studies of ambiguity resolution in young children have found that children rely heavily on lexical information but persistently fail to use referential constraints in online parsing [Trueswell, J.C., Sekerina, I., Hill, N.M., & Logrip, M.L, (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children.…

We report two sets of experiments that demonstrate syntactic priming from comprehension to comprehension in young children. Children acted out double-object and prepositional-object dative sentences while we monitored their eye movements. We measured whether hearing one type of dative as a prime influenced children's online interpretation of…

Three experiments explored the semantics of the mass-count distinction in young children and adults. In Experiments 1 and 2, the quantity judgments of participants provided evidence that some mass nouns refer to individuals, as such. Participants judged one large portion of stuff to be ''more'' than three tiny portions for substance-mass nouns…