Well-developed lexical representations are important for reading comprehension, but there have been no prior attempts to track growth in the depth of knowledge of particular words. This article examines increases in depth of vocabulary knowledge in 4-5-year-old preschool students (n = 240) who participated in a vocabulary intervention that taught…

This study investigated the noun definitions given by Cantonese speakers at different ages. Definitional responses on six concrete nouns from 1075 children aged 4;10 to 12;01 and 15 adults were analyzed with reference to the semantic content and the syntactic form. Results showed that conventional definitions produced by Cantonese adult speakers…

This investigation examined the ability of 44 preschool children to acquire novel words embedded in storybook contexts. Previous investigations of word learning have typically consisted of novel words for which synonyms exist. It is argued that the acquisition of unfamiliar words that refer to existing concepts that already have labels is not…

Sentences that refer to categories--generic sentences (e.g., "Dogs are friendly")--are frequent in speech addressed to young children and constitute an important means of knowledge transmission. However, detecting generic meaning may be challenging for young children, since it requires attention to a multitude of morphosyntactic, semantic, and…

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…