The basis for acquisition of categories in child language was investigated. The early encoding of the distinction between mass and count nouns was examined to determine whether children categorize them on the basis of semantic type or syntactic regularities. An experiment was designed in which semantic and syntactic cues were in competition:…

Children's acquisition of agent nouns within a framework of morphological structural principles is explored. Language acquisition has been conceptualized as a process of parameter setting in which the learner is richly endowed with a vocabulary of primitives and rule schemata. Exposure to the primary data will be filled in from the range of…

This study investigated whether mothers' responses to their infants' gestures play a role in their infants' vocabulary development. Eight infants were observed interacting at home with their mothers on 2 occasions, when the infants were 10 to 12 months old, and 16 to 18 months old. Videotapes of the observations were transcribed and coded for…

A study of data on Japanese children shows that the development of verbs occurs at the same time as the development of nouns and may even precede it. The subjects for the study were two children who were learning Japanese as their first language. Four speech samples, taken between the ages of 22 and 28 months, were audiotaped and supplemented by…

The spontaneous speech of a Mohawk-speaking boy was recorded from age 2;10 to 4;1. Analysis of this speech indicated that certain verbal prefixes are acquired earlier than suffixes. The pronominal prefix of nouns, on the other hand, enters late. Yet, before the appearance of any nominal affix, the child already uses a pronominal possessive as a…

The paper examines the nominal lexicon in later language acquisition as a window on linguistic knowledge and usage across childhood and adolescence. The paper presents a psycholinguistically motivated and cognitively grounded analysis of the distribution of ten semantic noun categories (the Noun Scale) across development, modality, and genre.…

A study of overregularized use of verbs by two children over a period when they were 2 1/2 to 5 years of age shows overregularizations in two directions: non-causative verbs were used as causatives; and causative verbs were used non-causatively. According to terminology from logic, predicates were classified according to the number of noun-phrase…

Research was conducted to study systematically the comprehension and production of the pronouns "he, she, him, her" in the language of normal and linguistically deviant children. The purposes of the study were to: observe the manner in which normal children comprehend and produce these four pronouns, in terms of both their use and their…

This study investigated the effectiveness of a natural environment language training procedure that combined the mand-model procedure and the time delay procedure for the acquisition of noun signs and for the spontaneous use of the signs acquired. One autistic boy, aged 5 years, 4 months with no verbal imitation skills and few movement imitation…