Humans are sensitive to the properties of individual items, and exemplar models are useful for capturing this sensitivity. I am a proponent of an extension of exemplar-based architectures that I briefly describe. However, exemplar models are very shallow architectures in which it is necessary to stipulate a set of primitive elements that make up…

The syntactic behaviour of human beings cannot be explained by analogical generalization on the basis of concrete exemplars: analogies in surface form are insufficient to account for human grammatical knowledge, because they fail to hold in situations where they should, and fail to extend in situations where they need to. [For Ben Ambridge's…

This commentary critiques Ambridge's radical exemplar model of language acquisition using research from the Longitudinal Study of Early Language, which has tracked the language development of 30+ children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) since 2002. This research has demonstrated that the children's capacity for abstraction at the grammatical…

Ambridge reviews and augments an impressive body of research demonstrating both the advantages and the necessity of an exemplar-based model of knowledge of one's language. He cites three computational models that have been applied successfully to issues of phonology and morphology. Focusing on Ambridge's discussion of sentence-level constructions,…

The goal of this article is to make the case for a radical exemplar account of child language acquisition, under which unwitnessed forms are produced and comprehended by on-the-fly analogy across multiple stored exemplars, weighted by their degree of similarity to the target with regard to the task at hand. Across the domains of (1) word meanings,…

This dissertation will focus on the processing and learning of abstract, phrasal argument structure constructions. Chapter 1 provides the theoretical framework for abstract constructions, and illustrates the importance of such representations in speakers' linguistic knowledge. Chapter 2 reviews the evidence for meaning being associated with…

Three experiments with children between 5 and 7 years are described. It is shown that nominal predication of an unknown word by a superordinate term enables young children to make appropriate inferences concerning its attributes. The results are discussed in relation to semantic development and reasoning in the young child. (Author/RM)

Analyzes concept formation in children based on the precepts of general semantics. (RB)

Early childhood learning of language has led some to postulate innate knowledge of an abstract symbolic linguistic system. However, if the child's abstract understanding initially requires concrete support in the form of agreement of the message with his nonlinguistic experience, the indication would be that the development of syntactic…

A study of the development of abstract noun definitions in children and adolescents had as its subjects 120 students evenly divided into age groups of 10-, 14-, and 18-year-olds, randomly selected from students scoring in the 40th to 88th percentiles on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (for 10-year-olds) and the Tests of Achievement and Proficiency…

Students, ages 12, 15, 18, and 23 (n=60 per group), wrote definitions for 16 abstract nouns. Responses were analyzed for Aristotelian style. There was an increasing tendency for students to mention the appropriate category to which a word belongs, core features of the word, and subtle aspects of meaning. (DB)

The multiordinal use of terms requires the ability to distinguish essential relationships and attributes from incidental ones. Until the child reaches adolescence, his tendency to confuse incidental and affective factors with those crucial to word meaning hinders his use of terms at all levels of abstraction. Korzybski's theory of multiordinality…

This study investigated developmental changes in semantic structure, focusing on whether changes could account for differences in the concepts acquired by children and those acquired by adults. Semantic structure was determined at each of four age levels (6, 9, 12 years and college students). Two indications of developmental change were observed…

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…

Evidence is provided to refute the suggestion, made by Macnamara et al. (1976), that four-year-old children perform logical operations corresponding to formal logic upon the sentential components of implicative verbs to produce indirect implications. It is argued that children use past knowledge plus additional premises to derive indirect…