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.…

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…

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)

The present experiment investigated: (1) the effect of pictorial elaboration on low socioeconomic-status Mexican-American children's long term memory for noun pairs; (2) the effects of labeling mode on estimates of paired-associate acquisition and retention; and (3) the interrelationships between paired-associate task performance and school…