The world's languages draw on a common set of event components for their verb systems. Yet, these components are differentially distributed across languages. At what age do children begin to use language-specific patterns to narrow possible verb meanings? English-, Japanese-, and Spanish-speaking adults, toddlers, and preschoolers were shown…

Details BootLex, a model using distributional cues to build a lexicon and achieving significant segmentation results with English, Japanese, and Spanish; child- and adult-directed speech, and written text; and variations in coding structure. Compares BootLex with three groups of computational models of the infant segmentation process. Discusses…

Syntactic knowledge is widely held to be partially innate, rather than learned. In a classic example, it is sometimes argued that children know the proper use of anaphoric "one," although that knowledge could not have been learned from experience. Lidz et al. [Lidz, J., Waxman, S., & Freedman, J. (2003). What infants know about syntax but couldn't…

Endel Tulving's distinction between "episodic" and "semantic" memory defines age differences in word association norms more comprehensively than the usual syntactic classifications. As subjects mature the principal development is an episodic-semantic shift. Young children associate primarily with the stimulus' perceived…