How do children resolve the problem of indeterminacy when learning a new word? By one account, children adopt a "taxonomic assumption" and expect the word to denote only members of a particular taxonomic category. According to one version of this constraint, young children should represent polysemous words that label multiple kinds--for…

Using a name-based categorization task, Nazzi found in 2005 that French-learning 20-month-olds can make use of one-feature consonantal contrasts between new labels but fail to do so with one-feature vocalic contrasts. This asymmetry was interpreted as developmental evidence for the proposal that consonants play a more important role than vowels at…

Two experiments compared how French vs. English adults and children (three to seven years) described motion events. Given typological properties (Talmy, 2000) and previous results (Choi & Bowerman, 1991; Hickmann, 2003; Slobin, 2003), the main prediction was that Manner should be more salient and therefore more frequently combined with Path (MP)…

Two-year-olds assign appropriate interpretations to verbs presented in two English transitivity alternations, the causal and unspecified-object alternations (Naigles, 1996). Here we explored how they might do so. Causal and unspecified-object verbs are syntactically similar. They can be either transitive or intransitive, but differ in the semantic…

The categorizations which humans make of the concrete world are not arbitrary but highly determined. In taxonomies of concrete objects, there is one level of abstraction at which the most basic category cuts are made. Basic categories are those which carry the most information, possess the highest category cue validity, and are, thus, the most…

Papers on child language development include: "Sentence Frame Effects on Children's Category Judgments" (Alison K. Adams); "Color Similarity in Children's Classifications and Extension of Object Labels" (Dare Baldwin); "Situational Properties of Early Verb Meaning" (Pol Cuvelier); "Similarity, Specificity, and…