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)

Examines research on the interpretation of ambiguous sentences and the presence or absence of contextual override effects. This study also examines the requirements placed on computational models of word-by-word incremental processing. The emerging picture is of a multiple constraint-based system in which knowledge ranging from lexical through…

Eight 20- to 26-month-old children were exposed to 4 novel nouns in a game context over several weeks to determine whether, when, and in what ways the children would use them beyond their original linguistic forms. The majority were productive in their use of the nouns, indicating that the grammatical category for noun is operational by age 2.…

Whether a deaf child not exposed to conventional language would incorporate a distinction between nouns and verbs into his self-styled communication system (through gestures) was studied. The distinction between verbs and nouns appeared in the child's communication system, suggesting that it is fundamental to human language. (SLD)

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…

Two experiments explored the tendency of preschoolers to map novel nouns and verbs onto unfamiliar rather than familiar objects or actions. This disambiguation effect has been interpreted as evidence that youngsters expect object or action labels to be mutually exclusive. The effect was stronger for object than for action words. (MDM)

Examined the spontaneous speech of four children and their parents for use of determiners with NP-type nouns and count nouns. Found that the parents made a clear distinction between the two kinds of nouns, omitting determiners with the NP-type nouns but not with the count nouns. The children all made the same distinction by four years of age. (HTH)

Compared the proportions of nouns and verbs in early vocabularies of English- and Mandarin-speaking toddlers and their mothers. Found that Mandarin-speaking children had relatively fewer nouns and more verbs than English-speaking children. When reading books, children's vocabularies were dominated by nouns but not when playing with toys. Mothers…

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…

Phonotactic probability, a measure of the likelihood of occurrence of a sound sequence, appears to facilitate noun learning (H. L. Storkel, 2001). Nouns and verbs, however, tend to differ in rate of acquisition, indicating that word-learning mechanisms may differ across grammatical class. The purpose of the current study was to examine the effect…

Spatial relations in American Sign Language (ASL) are often signed from the perspective of the signer and so involve a shift in perspective and mental rotation. This study examined developing knowledge of language used to refer to the spatial relations "front," "behind," "left," "right," "towards," "away," "above," and "below" by children learning…

In the study of language acquisition, one of the central problems is how to bridge a qualitative gap between the primary linguistic data (PLD) that children are exposed to and the final state of a particular grammar that children acquire. Universal Grammar (UG) is assumed to play a crucial role in this problem. The aims of this report are: (1) to…

Two studies addressed the relative strengths of object kind bias and syntactic knowledge in 2-year-olds' inductions of word meaning. The study looked at children's interpretations of novel proper names for familiar and unfamiliar objects. In each study, 10 children were assigned to each of 2 conditions (familiar and unfamiliar) and shown 2 cats…

Children at three age levels were administered Schutz and Keislar's word-span task using nouns, verbs and functors as stimuli. (Author/RM)

Describes a study designed to clarify the relationships among young children's age, reasoning ability, ability to add regular and irregular plurals to real and nonsense count nouns and testing methods. Discusses age as a factor employed to indicate how the use of plurals changes over time. (MES)