Using a preferential looking methodology with novel verbs, Gertner, Fisher and Eisengart (2006 ) found that 21-month-old English children seemed to understand the syntactic marking of transitive word order in an abstract, verb-general way. In the current study we tested whether young German children of this same age have this same understanding.…

Eight 20- to 26-month-old children were exposed to 4 novel nouns in a game context over several weeks to determine whether, when, and in what ways the children would use them beyond their original linguistic forms. The majority were productive in their use of the nouns, indicating that the grammatical category for noun is operational by age 2.…

Examined young children's language productivity with newly learned forms by teaching them four new words: two nouns and two verbs. Findings indicate children combined the novel nouns productively with already known words much more often than they did the novel verbs--by many orders of magnitude and several children pluralized the new nouns,…