Semantic roles are a critical aspect of linguistic knowledge because they indicate the relations of the participants in an event to the main predicate. Experimental studies on children and adults show that both groups use associations between general semantic roles such as Agent and Theme, and grammatical positions such as Subject and Object, even…

Addresses how phonological regularities of the native language are mastered. Explores consequences of the assumption that the architecture of the speech perception system includes a fast phonological prepossessor that uses language specific prosodic and phonotactic patterns to chunk the speech stream. Shows that as vocabulary size increases, more…

Proposes an alternative account of the child's learning of nouns and adjectives that relies on properties of the semantic categories to be learned and of the word-learning task itself. In five experiments, a simple connectionist network was trained to label input objects in particular contexts; the network learned categories resembling nouns…