NotesFAQContact Us
Collection
Advanced
Search Tips
Showing all 12 results Save | Export
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Gertner, Yael; Fisher, Cynthia – Cognition, 2012
Children use syntax to interpret sentences and learn verbs; this is syntactic bootstrapping. The structure-mapping account of early syntactic bootstrapping proposes that a partial representation of sentence structure, the "set of nouns" occurring with the verb, guides initial interpretation and provides an abstract format for new learning. This…
Descriptors: Toddlers, Comprehension, Sentences, Verbs
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Goldberg, Adele E. – Cognition, 2013
Typologists have long observed that there are certain distributional patterns that are not evenly distributed among the world's languages. This discussion note revisits a recent experimental investigation of one such intriguing case, so-called "universal 18", by Culbertson, Smolensky, and Legendre (2012). The authors find that adult learners are…
Descriptors: Language Classification, Adult Students, Grammar, Artificial Languages
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Spalek, Katharina; Bock, Kathryn; Schriefers, Herbert – Cognition, 2010
The form of a determiner is dependent on different contextual factors: in some languages grammatical number and grammatical gender determine the choice of a determiner variant. In other languages, the phonological onset of the element immediately following the determiner affects selection, too. Previous work has shown that the activation of…
Descriptors: Phonology, Nouns, Grammar, Language Processing
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Barner, David; Inagaki, Shunji; Li, Peggy – Cognition, 2009
We test the claim that acquiring a mass-count language, like English, causes speakers to think differently about entities in the world, relative to speakers of classifier languages like Japanese. We use three tasks to assess this claim: object-substance rating, quantity judgment, and word extension. Using the first two tasks, we present evidence…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Semantics, Nouns, Syntax
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Zapf, Jennifer A.; Smith, Linda B. – Cognition, 2008
The English plural is about the "number" of "individuals" in a "set" of "like kinds." Two-year-old children use the plural but do not do so in all obligatory contexts. The present report asks whether the limitations on their production of the plural are related to aspects of meaning. In two Experiments plural productions were elicited from…
Descriptors: Nouns, Morphemes, Semantics, English
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Temperley, David – Cognition, 2007
Gibson's Dependency Locality Theory (DLT) [Gibson, E. 1998. "Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies." "Cognition," 68, 1-76; Gibson, E. 2000. "The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity." In A. Marantz, Y. Miyashita, & W. O'Neil (Eds.), "Image,…
Descriptors: Linguistics, Nouns, English, Sentence Structure
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Goldin-Meadow, S.; Gelman, S.A.; Mylander, C. – Cognition, 2005
Utterances expressing generic kinds (''birds fly'') highlight qualities of a category that are stable and enduring, and thus provide insight into conceptual organization. To explore the role that linguistic input plays in children's production of generic nouns, we observed American and Chinese deaf children whose hearing losses prevented them from…
Descriptors: Linguistic Input, Linguistics, Nouns, Mandarin Chinese
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Gilboy, Elizabeth; And Others – Cognition, 1995
Three studies investigated Spanish and English readers' interpretations of sentences with complex noun phrases (NPs). In contrast to earlier findings, results provided evidence for cross-language universality of the late closure parsing principle. Results suggest that late closure is not language-specific but specific to only certain classes of…
Descriptors: Cross Cultural Studies, English, Language Patterns, Nouns
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Gelman, Susan A.; Tardif, Twila – Cognition, 1998
Three studies examined adults' generic noun phrases in English and Mandarin Chinese from child-directed speech of caregivers interacting with their toddlers. Found that generic noun phrases were reliably identified in both languages. Generic noun phrases most frequently referred to animals. Non-generic noun phrases were used most frequently for…
Descriptors: Adults, Caregiver Speech, Child Caregivers, Classification
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Lidz, Jeffrey; Waxman, Sandra – Cognition, 2004
Lidz, Waxman, and Freedman [Lidz, J., Waxman, S., & Freedman, J. (2003). What infants know about syntax but couldn't have learned: Evidence for syntactic structure at 18-months. "Cognition," 89, B65-B73.] argue that acquisition of the syntactic and semantic properties of anaphoric one in English relies on innate knowledge within the learner.…
Descriptors: Syntax, Semantics, Stimuli, Infants
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Yoshida, Hanako; Smith, Linda B. – Cognition, 2001
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…
Descriptors: Classification, Comparative Analysis, Cross Cultural Studies, English
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Vigliocco, Gabriella; And Others – Cognition, 1996
Reports four experiments examining subject-verb agreement errors in Spanish and English. Discusses cross-linguistic differences within the framework of the computational model of grammatical encoding proposed by Kempen and Hoenkamp. Suggests that languages differ in the extent to which the selection of the verb is controlled by features on the…
Descriptors: Cognitive Processes, Comparative Analysis, Discourse Analysis, English