Grammatical gender is generally considered an early and error-free acquisition in French children. This article first examines how children cope with the gender attribution problem, "i.e.", how they determine the gender of individual nouns. We consider the plausibility and requirements of an account in which tacit phonological assignment rules are…

Act-out and intermodal preferential looking (IPL) tasks were administered to 67 English children aged 2-0, 2-9 and 3-5 to assess their comprehension of canonical SVO transitive word order with both familiar and novel verbs. Children at 3-5 and at 2-9 showed evidence of comprehending word order in both verb conditions and both tasks, although…

In many cognitive domains, learning is more effective when exemplars are distributed over a number of sessions than when they are all presented within one session. The present study investigated this "distributed learning effect" with respect to English-speaking children's acquisition of a complex grammatical construction. Forty-eight children…

This study of early word learning focused on the status of object words in early vocabularies. Fourteen children were followed from nine months to two years of age, and monthly vocabulary growth was analyzed. Results indicated that object words represented approximately one-third, on average, of the different words the children learned. (TJQ)

Children ages five, seven, and nine years named objects with multiple names in a neutral context and in a biased context. Children selected names in accord with nonlinguistic constraints, but at the cost of longer naming times. Both name selection success and associated cost were more evident in older children than in younger children. (TJQ)

This study of 2.5 and 3.5 year olds indicated that children of this age do not know many names for solid substances but can be taught names for them; that children represent the names as mass nouns and possibly adjectives; and that there is development of children's nonlinguistic knowledge of substances between the ages of 2.5 and 3 years. (TJQ)

Eight 20- to 26-month-old children were exposed to 4 novel nouns in a game context over several weeks to determine whether, when, and in what ways the children would use them beyond their original linguistic forms. The majority were productive in their use of the nouns, indicating that the grammatical category for noun is operational by age 2.…

The causal structure of schemas for the actions and states by different classes of English verbs was examined in the elicited narratives of 19 preschool children. Results showed that verbs within a class elicited similar narratives, whereas across classes the event descriptions varied in the animacy of the event participants and the causal…

Reviews "The Transition from Infancy to Language: Acquiring the Power of Expression" (L. Bloom). Underscores that Bloom's account of word learning represents an ethnographic, theoretic, and research approach that explores development by starting with the child, and looks at the many behaviors of the child and views these in relation to…

A study of two year olds investigated the nature and development of children's early productivity with verb-argument structure and verb morphology. Results indicated that the children showed no signs of productive verb morphology, but they did use newly learned verbs in some creative ways involving nounlike uses and the appending of locatives.…

Examines children's variation in rate, style, and sequence of grammatical development, within and across natural languages. Using a sample of English and Italian infants, concludes that while there are structural differences between English and Italian that could affect the order in which nouns and verbs are acquired, no differences were observed…