In recent years, linguists have increasingly turned to the cognitive sciences to broaden their investigation into the roots and development of language. With the advent of cognitive-linguistic, usage-based and complex-adaptive models of language, linguists today are utilizing approaches and insights from cognitive psychology, neuropsychology,…

Young children's comprehension and overdiscrimination of natural language concepts were examined by asking 2- and 4-year-old children to select pictorial instances of five concrete semantic concepts. Results suggest that young children initially tend to use concept labels in a very restricted manner. (JMB)

Two experiments documented that conceptual knowledge influences 3-year-olds' extension of novel words. When objects were described as having conceptual properties typical of artifacts, children extended novel labels on the basis of shape. When same objects were described as having conceptual properties typical of animate kinds, children extended…

Effects of receptive vs. expressive training of category labels on acquisition of generalized referential labels by six prelinguistic severely mentally retarded children (5-19 years old) were investigated. Data indicated that receptive training resulted in more accurate generalization to novel category members than did expressive training.…

Preliminary evidence indicates that children begin to generalize knowledge in a new way at approximately 3 years of age. Forty children between 1.5 and 3.5 years of age were given two tasks of graded complexity. The first and simpler task used four nonoverlapping classes, each composed of four identical objects. Two of the classes were tagged with…

Reports a study which examines some of the properties of objects to determine whether the number of different examples of an object concept presented to infants influences concept learning and generalization and to discover whether children's behavior and language in relation to new objects influence learning the concept and generalization to new…

The progressive inflection "-ing" appears to be the earliest verb inflection acquired by children learning English as their first language. Explanations are made on why the progressive is rarely, if ever, overgeneralized to inappropriate forms. (SW)

Two implications of best-example theory for category acquisition were tested using a set of artificial concrete object categories. Categories acquired from initial exposure to good exemplars were learned more easily and accurately. People learn the best exemplars are category members before learning the poor exemplars are category members.…

Clarifies features of Smith et al.'s attentional learning account of object naming, arguing that Booth and Waxman's findings address tenets not in the attentional learning account while not addressing one of the central tenets of the attentional learning account. Suggests that the debate about the nature of children's language and cognition would…

Responds to Smith et al.'s work on relations between perceptual, conceptual, and linguistic knowledge in early word learning and discusses treatment of evidence. Asserts that Smith et al.'s commentary fails to engage data presented and their implications. Asserts that learners seamlessly integrate perceptual, linguistic, and conceptual information…

This study investigates how children learn not to overgeneralize about grammatical forms and how to reformulate hypotheses about the grammar of their language even when receiving little or no explicit feedback. Two proposals were looked at: (1) input monitoring theory stating that certain overgeneralizations are eliminated from production because…

Examined three-year-old children's ability to generalize novel words to new instances. Suggested that children's similarity judgments and feature selection in name generalization are guided by nonstrategic attentional processes that are minimally influenced by new conceptual information. Proposed that these findings may explain the extraordinary…

Linguistic and cognitive competencies of preschoolers were revealed by interviewing them about routine activities. It was found that freeing preschoolers' speech from constraints inherent in talking about the immediate context results in their demonstrating control over a variety of language-related skills that are generally assumed to be beyond…

One of the most important capacities which children employ when learning language is the capacity to generalize. A child who hears an utterance of a verbal expression while perceiving a particular object (or action, aspect, etc.) becomes normally able to apply the expression not only to this object but also to all those objects which, for him, are…

From the standpoint of transformational grammar, this experimental work evaluates the extent to which children choose or fail to generalize their rules for the placement of the negative particles "not" and "n't." The subjects were eight three- and four-year-olds of middle-class background who had been producing sentences with…