Errors differ in degree of seriousness. We asked whether preschoolers would use the magnitude of an informant's errors to decide if that informant would be a good source of information later. Four- and 5-year-olds observed two informants incorrectly label familiar objects, but one informant's errors were closer to the correct answer than the…

In the course of language development children must solve arbitrary form-to-meaning mappings, in which semantic components are encoded onto linguistic labels. Because sign languages describe motion and location of entities through iconic movements and placement of the hands in space, child signers may find spatial semantics-to-language mapping…

Four experiments used a free-naming task to examine four-year olds' and adults' default construals of solids and nonsolids. Found that children named an individual-related word (such as shape) for solid materials, but gave a substance-related name for nonsolids. Results suggest that children conceptualize solids and nonsolids in distinct,…

Examined thematic and grammatical role categories accessible to preschool children and how access to these categories changes with age. Results of three experiments with children and adults confirmed the psychological reality of certain semantic categories, and provided evidence suggesting a transition in the prominence of semantic relative to…

Study of 3 and 7 year olds and adults examined role that changes in continuity, direction, instrument, and causative agent play in children's and adults' initial assumptions about meaning of novel motion verbs and events. Subjects made similar initial assumptions, but children generalized more conservatively than adults to all change types in…

A study with three- and five-year olds contrasted two important proposals regarding children's assumptions about word meanings: the taxonomic assumption proposal and the shape bias proposal. Results suggest that perceptual similarity, particularly shape similarity, is very important in early word meaning but that children gradually shift their…

Attempts to determine whether children can use social-pragmatic cues to determine "what kind" of referent, object, or action an adult intends to indicate with a novel word. Doubts that children assume that a novel word refers to whatever nameless object is present. Suggests that lexical acquisition rests fundamentally on children's…

Examines whether knowledge of functional properties of a referent for a new name influences children's first guesses about whether that name refers to an object or a substance. Suggests that children do not rely on a single source of information, but rather draw on various kind of information, including perceptual characteristics of the entities…

Investigated third and sixth graders' understanding of factive presupposition using two tasks: one requiring an abstract truth judgment of the verb complement, the other calling for informal judgment of consistency between the target sentence and the negation of its complement. Results indicated the development of factive presupposition is an…