Four experiments with 36 infants studied how children organize objects categorically in the absence of input. Outcomes were not consistent with the predictions of bias accounts and considerably weaken the case for a psychologically real noun-bias prior to the vocabulary explosion. Findings are more consistent with children's use of information as…

Reviews "The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language" (S. Pinker). Defines generative grammar, examines the evidence for Pinker's Generative Grammar as Instinct hypothesis, and discusses Pinker's use of language acquisition as support for the hypothesis. Suggests alternative theories of language that begin from different…

Proposes a theoretical sequence of cognitive developments as influencing representational play and language in the second year of life. Structural and temporal links between play and language indicate influence of developing mental representation, but variation in timing of developments points to influence of variables. (ET)

The hypothesis that children with specific language impairments (SLI) have a hierarchical planning deficit was evaluated with 15 boys (ages 5 to 7) with SLI and 15 controls, who built 4 hierarchical structures varying in complexity. Results did not support the idea that a central hierarchical planning mechanism underlies language and nonlanguage…

Linguistic imitation by 48 children with Down's syndrome was compared to that of 57 children without mental retardation. The children with Down's syndrome imitated slightly less. This difference was related to language level and the source of the imitation, suggesting that children with Down's syndrome develop differently with respect to…

This study examined the acquisition of verb particles and prepositions in language-impaired, language-matched, and age-matched preschool children (total n=42). Results indicated that the use of verb particles constituted a particularly challenging task for the language-impaired subjects relative to both the age-matched and language-matched peers.…

Two groups of 32 junior kindergarten and 32 first-grade children performed an instance and superordinate name comprehension task, using 96 single-exemplar pictures from 12 categories. High rates of instance name intrusions and other findings suggest that superordinate name production may be interfered with by more readily available instance names.…

The literature on how and when children acquire temporal concepts is reviewed in the context of the acquisition of time concepts by deaf children. The stages at which children acquire concepts of clock, calendar, historical time, and chronology, and effects of language acquisition are discussed. A more formal structure of temporal concepts in the…

This study examined how novel words foster the formation of object categories for 12- to 13-month olds. Results indicated that by 12 to 13 months, infants have begun to distinguish between novel words presented as count nouns versus adjectives in fluent, infant-directed speech, and that infants' expectations for novel words accord with this…

Two studies examined whether 1-year olds' name learning during joint attention was guided by expectation that names will be in the form of spoken words. Results showed that 13-month olds, but not 20-month olds, learned a new sound/object correspondence, as evidenced by their choosing targets reliably in responses to hearing the word or sound on…

Examined preschoolers' ability to map novel adjectives to object properties in two experiments. Found that 4-year-olds could extend novel adjectives from target to matching test object whether objects were drawn from same, or different, basic level categories. If 3-year-olds' first extended a novel adjective to objects in the same basic level…

Language and reading outcomes at 6 to 9 years of age were examined in 34 children who were late talkers as toddlers. Late talkers performed in the average range on most language and reading tasks by age 5 and 6 but were somewhat less skilled than comparison children at ages 8 and 9. (Contains references.) (Author/DB)

Three experiments investigated the developmental progression of reliance on object function versus object shape to extend novel words among 3- and 5-year olds and adults. Findings indicated that children focused on shape, whereas adults focused on function when extending novel words, suggesting a developmental change in the consideration of these…

Mental state language was examined in Mandarin- speaking and Cantonese-speaking toddlers. Results suggested that theory-of-mind development was similar to that in English, with early use of desire terms followed by other mental state references. Much earlier emergence of desire terms and infrequent use of thinking terms suggests cultural…

Language, as is known, is acquired under certain conditions: rapid and sequential brain maturation and cognitive development, the need to exchange information and to control others' actions, and an exposure to appropriate speech input. This research aims at analyzing preschoolers' overgeneralizations of the object labeling process in different…