Having heard "a pimwit", English-speakers assume that "the pimwit" is also possible. This type of productivity is attributed to syntactic categories such as NOUN and DETERMINER, but the key question is "how" do humans become endowed with these categories in the first place. We propose a novel approach that combines…

When talking to infants, adults, especially mothers, espouse a particular type of speech known as Infant-directed Speech (IDS) or "babytalk" or "babytalking" , which contains a set of specialized speech with simplified grammatical construction; more repetitive; and more grammatical than adult-directed speech. Specifically, this…

Some research in child language suggests that semantically general verbs appear in grammatical structures earlier than semantically complex, specific ones. The present study examines whether this was the case in nouns, using imageability as a proxy measure of semantic generality. Longitudinal corpus data from 12 children from the Manchester corpus…

Via naturalistic observations, parent interview, and direct assessments, we examined language proficiency, language use, and differentiation of a 3-year, 4-month-old bilingual child exposed to Mandarin and English via the "one parent-one language" principle. Although noun versus verb dominance has been explored across verb-based…

Six tests of the spontaneous speech of twenty-one English-speaking children (1 ; 10 to 2 ; 8; MLUs 1[middle dot]53 to 4[middle dot]38) demonstrate the presence of the syntactic category determiner from the start of combinatorial speech, supporting nativist accounts. Children use multiple determiners before a noun to the same extent as their…

This study explores the acquisition of complex words composed of both verbs and nouns through novel forms produced spontaneously by a French-English bilingual child. Diary recordings were kept by the child's mother from ages 2:8 to 5:0. The results showed little support for a proposed developmental sequence based on cross-sectional data e.g.,…

Investigates structural and pragmatic aspects of caregiver input in English and Korean that relate to the early development of nouns and verbs. Twenty mothers in each language were asked to interact with their children in two contexts: Book-reading and toy-play. Data suggest that systematic comparisons of caregiver input within and across…