Human infants are predisposed to organize their experience in terms of certain concepts (natural) and not others (unnatural). Three formal, necessary conditions on the naturalness of concepts are offered. The conditions attempt to link the problem of naturalness to principled distinctions between sense vs nonsense, simplicity vs complexity, and…

An approach to teaching grammar concepts treats conceptualization as a process of sensitization, consisting of three stages: motivating the student to learn the concept, presenting the operating concept and the grammatical category in question, and consolidating and enriching the concept in the student's mind. (MSE)

Two semantic theories of word learning, a perceptual complexity hypothesis (H. Clark, 1970) and a quantitative complexity hypothesis (E. Clark, 1972) were tested by teaching 24 preschoolers and 16 college students CVC labels for five polar spatial adjective concepts having single word representations in English, and for three having no direct…

Focusing on the acquisition of semantic features and the relation between semantic and perceptual features, this study further tests the "semantic feature hypothesis," where a child acquires full adult word meaning component by component, and its complementary "correlation hypothesis," which claims that the source of these semantic features lies…

Twenty-four children aged five and twenty-four children aged six were interviewed individually three times during a calendar year. It was found that not only did the children's language develop over the period, as judged syntactically and lexically, but they also showed an increasingly fluent control over their own style. All the children…