This study examines the distribution of nouns and verbs in maternal speech to one year olds. Mothers and children were videotaped. Nouns and verbs in maternal speech were coded for frequency, sentence position, and occurrence with grammatical inflections. Frequency of nouns and verbs varied with context. (33 references) (KM)

A study charting the development of 120 participants to define is presented. Participants were asked to define eight concrete and eight abstract nouns. Results indicate that there are significant differences in the way concrete and abstract nouns are defined. (32 references) (GLR)

Discusses two studies that examine whether children are sensitive to the fact that adjectives and nouns differ in the contrast they imply. Results show that by age four, children are sensitive to this. Implications for children's use of referential language and word learning strategies are discussed. (SED)

Thirty children with a mean length of utterance ranging from 1.00 to 4 and an age range of 1.7 to 5.5 were tested for comprehension of two-noun possessive phrases. Three types of possessive relationships were used to uncover children's knowledge of the semantics and syntax of English possession. (Author/AM)

In four experiments with children aged 3;2 to 8;10, subjects were found more likely to regularize denominal verbs than homophonous irregular verb roots and more likely to regularize exocentric nouns than homophonous irregular endocentric nouns. Children at an early age are sensitive to abstract linguistic notions that underlie adults' linguistic…

Marcus (1995) suggests that the rate of overregularization of English irregular plural nouns is not substantively different from that of English irregular past tense verbs. A response to this claim reviews longitudinal parental report data, which indicates that children are significantly more likely to produce noun overregularizations than verb…

Two experiments investigated the factors that govern children's use of singular and plural forms of count nouns. Experiment 1 used an elicited production task to investigate whether children use referential and/or syntactic information to determine the form of the count nouns when the two sources of information conflict (e.g. "each x, one of the…

Fourteen mothers and their children participated in a storybook reading session in which the mothers taught their children both a basic-level count noun and a situation-restricted count noun for a series of object drawings. Analysis of mothers' spontaneous teaching strategies revealed that they typically taught a basic-level count noun before a…

This paper focuses on aspects of early lexical acquisition in German. There have been conflicting results in the literature concerning both the pattern of vocabulary growth and the composition of the early lexicon. Our study describes the development of various categories of words and questions the preponderance of nouns in spontaneous speech. 32…

Reports a study which examines some of the properties of objects to determine whether the number of different examples of an object concept presented to infants influences concept learning and generalization and to discover whether children's behavior and language in relation to new objects influence learning the concept and generalization to new…

Presents a quantitative study of children's noun plural overregularizations on recent comparisons of connectionist and symbolic models of language. The speech of 10 English-speaking children aged 1;3 to 5;2 were analyzed. Results pose challenges to connectionist models, but are consistent with the blocking-and-retrieval-failure model in which…

This study shows that the noun bias in early vocabularies rests only in part on the acquisition of object names. An analysis of vocabulary composition from 45 children at I;8 indicates that more nouns are acquired than all other word classes but that only about half of the nouns acquired are the names of basic level object classes (BLOCs). (KM)

Properties of the input, such as raw frequency and syntactic diversity, have been shown to play a role, to different extents, in the acquisition of nouns and verbs. This study investigated the relationship between three properties of the input (input frequency, syntactic diversity, and variety in noun-type co-occurrence) and age of acquisition of…

Mothers were found to respond differentially to their infants' object-related gestures. Pointing was found to have an especially strong correlation with mothers' object-labelling responses, which in turn were predictive of the child's object-naming vocabulary. (Author/JB)

A study of two- to six-year-olds' spontaneous uses of "from" to mark oblique agents showed that, while the two-year-olds produced "from" for agents and "with" for instruments in imitation, older subjects shifted to "by" for agents and kept "from" to mark locative sources. (Author/CB)