A line of reasoning used in recent research on language acquisition assumes that a child acquiring the language has only two reliable sources of information available about the target grammar: a set of grammatical principles and the primary data of the language spoken around him. A third kind of evidence, negative evidence, would be helpful but is…

Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that, when interpreted in context, general terms are typically encoded on the basis of an instantiation. The results indicated that a particular term naming the expected instantiation of a general term was a better cue for the recall of a sentence than the general term itself, even though the general…