In Study 1, 4-year-olds avoided 2 names for an object when exposed to a common or a proper noun in a puppet's presence or to a common noun in a puppet's absence, but not when exposed to a proper noun in a puppet's absence. In Study 2, 3-year-olds avoided 2 names for an object when the requester for the referent of a second label in a different…

Four experiments were conducted to investigate the memory status of inflectional forms of verbs, irregular past tense words, and adjective and nominal derivatives of verbs. Results indicated that inflections do not have memory representations separate from their base words, but adjective and nominal derivatives and irregular past tense words do.…

In three experiments, adults and 30-month-old children (1) selected a novel object as the referent for a novel term; (2) extended the new word to another exemplar; and (3) allowed the new word to preempt another novel label from applying to the just-named object. (BC)

A variable time delay naming latency paradigm was used to investigate the processing of noun-verb lexical ambiguities (e.g., "watch") in syntactic contexts that biased either the noun or the verb reading. Results support a two-stage model in which all reading of ambiguous words are initially accessed, followed by suppression of…

A six-year-old nonvocal girl with autism who had acquired a variety of signs and imitative responses consistently failed to acquire a tact (labeling) repertoire. When procedures to transfer stimulus control from verbal to nonverbal stimuli were implemented, the subject quickly learned to tact all 18 target stimuli. (Author/DB)

Reports on experiments examining the semantic organization of concrete nouns and verbs and its development in childhood. Differences in semantic organization are said to be a clue to age-related changes in performance with verbs. (AM)