This experiment was designed to investigate the possibility that young children use syntax to constrain and focus verb meanings in their interpretations of novel scenes and novel verbs. Subjects were 24 children, 12 males and 12 females, of 23 to 27 months, all raised in English-speaking homes. Their mean productive vocabulary was 240 words. A…

This study examined prior qualitative differences in the process of the emergence of verb use in two sisters when they were each 12 to 24 months of age (the older sister is 2 years and 9 months older than the younger sister). Daily diaries on both children were kept by the mother, who noted emergent structure and vocabulary. Systematic Analysis of…

A study investigated Japanese children's acquisition of the syntactical subcategorization of action verbs. Aspects of caregiver language that provide children with information about the characteristics of an action verb are detailed, and the utterances of four Japanese toddlers are analyzed for their usage characteristics. Caregiver sentences are…

Two studies investigated whether young children acquiring verbs at an exceptional rate can use the syntactic structure of familiar and unfamiliar verbs to make conjectures about some aspect of the meanings of those verbs. The preferential looking paradigm (Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek, 1981) was used to set up a naturalistic pairing of scene and…

A study tested the hypothesis that if, for the 2-year-old, the transitive/intransitive distinction functions to signal differences in the conceptualization of actions, the child's sentence production should show a relationship between sentence frame and (1) locus of change animacy and (2) the child's expectations concerning an action's outcome.…

A study examined use of passive and antipassive constructions in the spontaneous utterances and picture comprehension responses of young speakers of Quiche Mayan, aged 1-5. This usage was compared with use of similar constructions in English-speaking children. Quiche-speakers' usage was found to be precocious in comparison with English-speakers'…