There is overwhelming evidence that children's first words are primarily nouns even across languages. These data are interpreted as evidence of a "Natural Partitions Theory," one that holds that the concepts referred to by nouns are conceptually more basic than those referred to by verbs or prepositions. Analysis of data from…

Two experiments were conducted to determine whether children, ages 4-7 assign invariant labels to objects or describe the objects in terms of the context of alternatives. The acquisition of adjective ordering rules and information limits on children's utterances were also examined. (JMB)

A total of 34 children, ages 2 and a half to 6, were presented with sentences for imitation that either violated or honored a prenominal adjective ordering rule, which requires that size adjectives must precede color adjectives. Two response measures were evaluated in terms of these sentence types: latency to begin a sentence imitation and recall…

Reports a study which examines some of the properties of objects to determine whether the number of different examples of an object concept presented to infants influences concept learning and generalization and to discover whether children's behavior and language in relation to new objects influence learning the concept and generalization to new…

Three experiments examined preschoolers' and adults' understanding of distinctive semantic functions of adjectives and count nouns. Found that 4-year olds and adults, but not 3-year olds, who heard the adjective version (e.g., "a blue bird") were more likely than those who heard the count noun version ("a bluebird") to choose…

Presents a quantitative study of children's noun plural overregularizations on recent comparisons of connectionist and symbolic models of language. The speech of 10 English-speaking children aged 1;3 to 5;2 were analyzed. Results pose challenges to connectionist models, but are consistent with the blocking-and-retrieval-failure model in which…

This study shows that the noun bias in early vocabularies rests only in part on the acquisition of object names. An analysis of vocabulary composition from 45 children at I;8 indicates that more nouns are acquired than all other word classes but that only about half of the nouns acquired are the names of basic level object classes (BLOCs). (KM)

Three experiments tested 3-year-olds' subordinate classification. The first experiment found that novel noun presentation hindered classification. The second and third experiments found that provision of information for the purpose of distinguishing relevant subclasses, and introduction of novel nouns in conjunction with familiar basic level…

This study analyzed data from a diary study of a child's lexical development. Correct forms and errors in the use of the plural morpheme were recorded from 18 to 30 months. Morphology was acquired before syntax, and there was evidence for a syntactic definition of noun by the age of 20 months. (BC)

The present research examined how 3- and 5-year-old Japanese children map novel nouns and verbs onto dynamic action events and generalize them to new instances. Studies 1 to 3 demonstrated that although both 3- and 5-year-olds were able to map novel nouns onto novel objects, only 5-year-olds could generalize verbs solely on the basis of the…

Two experiments examined the role of perceptual complexity, object familiarity and form class cues on how children interpret novel adjectives and count nouns. Four-year-old children participated in a forced-choice match-to-target task in which an exemplar was named with a novel word and children were asked to choose another one that matched the…

A study of infant language acquisition investigated the possibility that perceptual or attentional tendencies may guide early word learning by directing infants' attention in linguistically relevant ways. In the experiment, infants aged 9 to 13 months watched a puppet show; with some children, sentences labeling either the objects (noun-frame…

A study of the development of abstract noun definitions in children and adolescents had as its subjects 120 students evenly divided into age groups of 10-, 14-, and 18-year-olds, randomly selected from students scoring in the 40th to 88th percentiles on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (for 10-year-olds) and the Tests of Achievement and Proficiency…