Two studies investigated how flexible children are when asked to switch from one semantic interpretation to another. Three distinctly different standards for the adjectives "big" and "little" were examined: normative, perceptual, and functional. The first study looked at whether some standards are harder than others to represent and whether…

Investigated overextensions in comprehension and production, using the preferential-looking model, in 99 children (ages 1;9 to 2;3) who were asked to find the referent that matched the label they were given in real and anomalous trials. Results confirm that overextensions in production are not diagnostic of children's underlying semantic…

Two experiments examining adults' use of dimensional adjectives focused specifically on the distinction made between height and overall size as determiners of "bigness." The subjects in both experiments were college students. In the first, the hypothesis that the meaning of "big" shifts as a function of the object being…