Despite the seemingly simple mapping between adjectives and perceptual properties (e.g., color, texture), preschool children have difficulty establishing the appropriate extension of novel adjectives. When children hear a novel adjective applied to an individual object, they successfully extend the adjective to other members of the same object…

This article investigates the relationship between third person singular present tense agreement morphemes, copula "is" and verb-"s", at 2;00 and 2;03. Language samples from 60 children at 2;00 were analyzed for the productivity of copula "is" as measured by the number of different morphemes preceding "is"…

Purpose: The goals of this study were to quantify longitudinal expectations for verb lexicon growth and to determine whether verb lexicon measures were better predictors of later grammatical outcomes than noun lexicon measures. Method: Longitudinal parent-report measures from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (Fenson et al.,…

It is by now well established that toddlers use the linguistic context in which a new word--and particularly a new verb--appears to discover aspects of its meaning. But what aspects of the linguistic context are most useful? To begin to investigate this, we ask how 2-year-olds use two sources of linguistic information that are known to be useful…

To acquire the meanings of verbs, toddlers make use of the surrounding linguistic information. For example, 2-year-olds successfully acquire novel transitive verbs that appear in semantically rich frames containing content nouns ("The boy is gonna pilk a balloon"), but they have difficulty with pronominal frames ("He is gonna pilk…

Nouns form the first building blocks of children's language but are not consistently modified by other words until around 2.5 years of age. Before then, children often combine their nouns with gestures that indicate the object labeled by the noun, for example, pointing at a bottle while saying "bottle." These gestures are typically…

Purpose: The current study used an intervention design to test the hypothesis that parent input sentences with diverse lexical noun phrase (NP) subjects would accelerate growth in children's sentence diversity. Method: Child growth in third person sentence diversity was modeled from 21-30 months (n = 38) in conversational language samples obtained…

Early identification and appropriate intervention services for children who are deaf or hard of hearing significantly increase the likelihood of better language, speech, and social-emotional development. However, current research suggests that there is a critical shortage of professionals trained to provide early intervention services to deaf and…

Three studies examined 24-month-olds' sensitivity to the prior accuracy of the source of information and the way in which young children modify their word learning from inaccurate sources. In Experiments 1A, 2, and 3, toddlers interacted with an accurate or inaccurate speaker who trained and tested children's comprehension of a new word-object…

The Community Connections preschool program (herein referred to as Community Connections) was developed to help prepare children in home-based child care for success in school and in life. It has three goals: (1) to make state prekindergarten classroom experiences available to children in home-based care, (2) to extend classroom learning…

Prior studies indicate that children vary widely in their mathematical knowledge by the time they enter preschool and that this variation predicts levels of achievement in elementary school. In a longitudinal study of a diverse sample of 44 preschool children, we examined the extent to which their understanding of the cardinal meanings of the…