Presents a study of the effects of training 18 subjects, 28-40 months, in the use of two-word subject-verb utterances. The study focused on: (1) the number of different semantic relations underlying the subject-verb form in which the child is trained, and (2) the relationship between the semantic relations and ongoing, experimentally manipulated…

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:…

Extensive longitudinal data were gathered on a child's entry into the symbolically mediated modal world by examining changes in the semantics and pragmatics of her uses of modal auxiliary verbs. The data are 53 transcripts of natural conversations between a girl, Nina, and her mother recorded periodically from her 23rd month to her 39th month. The…

Children's understanding of the nature of polar terms and comparative terms between the polar opposites is discussed. (CHK)

Diary observations of two-year-olds' over-extended word use have been interpreted as arising from the word's underlying semantic feature structure. This interpretation was rejected after a study of five children. The need to construct models of early word meaning reflecting certain early language development patterns is discussed. (CHK)

The comprehension ability of 36 children at three stages of telegraphic speech was assessed using active behavioral responses to declarative and imperative sentences. A significant increase in verbal and behavioral appropriateness with age was found for imperative and declarative forms. Results are compared with Shipley, Smith and Gleitman's…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the status of deictic reference in the speech of 19 three-year-old Black children. The deictic verbs of motion are examined with reference to other aspects of the deictic system. The data for this study are approximately eight hours of spontaneous speech collected in a pre-school classroom. The hypothesis to…

Data on the development of fundamental frequency patterns and the emergence of semantic relations during the "one word period" in child language development are reported in this study. The research focuses on the changes that occur as children progress from producing single words to sequences of single words and finally to producing…

Two children's spontaneous utterances containing the comparative structure are examined for their semantic content. Many comparatives are found to encode the notion "A has property X," and this use is often found in reference to the presence of X to an extreme, rather than a non-extreme, extent. The uses of the comparative are analyzed…

A study was conducted to test whether three, four, and five-year-old children would be better able to use either static or dynamic properties for grouping objects, and whether performance under these conditions would be better than when no property was given. One of the two study tasks, the free sort, also used by Rosch et al. (1976), asked…

Comprehension of the quantifiers "some" and "all" was studied with 202 children, three to nine years old. Thirty-two quantifier sentences dealing with descriptions of circles and squares were presented to the children. Wooden objects were presented to some children to see if results were affected by the choice of abstract objects, but no…

From the standpoint of transformational grammar, this experimental work evaluates the extent to which children choose or fail to generalize their rules for the placement of the negative particles "not" and "n't." The subjects were eight three- and four-year-olds of middle-class background who had been producing sentences with…

Explores the underlying knowledge that children have about the relationship between the structure of requests and the relative status of speakers and listeners. Shows that the three age groups (preschoolers, 5-year-olds, and 10-year-olds) could systematically differentiate the requests by means of syntactic directness or semantics. (HOD)

This paper describes part of a larger study dealing with syntax and semantics of the child's early speech about motion and location. It suggests that goal, defined as the point at which a motion ends and a resulting locative state begins, is the organizing principle for the semantics of motion and location. The data presented here are from two…