Acquisition of an argument structure may be affected by the diversity of lexical types that appear in that structure (Conwell et al., 2011; Yang, 2016). Seventy-two 5- and 6-year-old English-speaking children completed a learning study where they were exposed to a novel argument structure and then tested on their ability to comprehend it. The…

This study investigates the influence of semantic maturation on early lexical development by examining the impact of contextual diversity--known to influence semantic development--on word promotion from receptive to productive vocabularies (i.e., comprehension-expression gap). Study 1 compares the vocabularies of 3685 American-English-speaking…

Adults create and update predictions about what speakers will say next. This study asks whether prediction can drive language acquisition, by testing whether 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 45) adapt to recent information when learning novel words. The study used a syntactic context which can precede both nouns and verbs to manipulate children's…

Young children often fail to generalize a novel verb based on sameness of action since they have difficulty focusing on the relational similarity across events while at the same time ignoring the objects that are involved. Study 1, with Japanese-speaking 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 28 in each group), found that similarity of objects involved in action…

Generic sentences (e.g., "Birds lay eggs") convey generalizations about entire categories and may thus be an important source of knowledge for children. However, these sentences cannot be identified by a simple rule, requiring instead the integration of multiple cues. The present studies focused on 3- to 5-year-olds' (N = 91) use of…

When can children speaking Japanese, English, or Chinese map and extend novel nouns and verbs? Across 6 studies, 3- and 5-year-old children in all 3 languages map and extend novel nouns more readily than novel verbs. This finding prevails even in languages like Chinese and Japanese that are assumed to be verb-friendly languages (e.g., T. Tardif,…

Investigates whether patient animacy affected the acquisition of the passive construction of syntax of 32 children aged two-five years. Results indicate that children who were taught the passive with animate patients produced more passives in the teaching phase than did comparable children who received inanimate patients. (RJC)

Three experiments investigated whether preschoolers attend to actions or object when learning a novel verb. Findings showed that children learning nouns in the context of novel, moving objects attended exclusively to appearances of objects. Children learning verbs attended equally to appearances and motions. With familiar objects, children…

Reports three experiments which examined preschool, first-grade, and third-grade children's understanding of metaphorical language. Subjects acted out short stories which ended in metaphorical sentences by using toys. Predictability of the story endings and the complexity of the metaphorical sentences are found to affect metaphor comprehension.…