Vygotsky measured his 'zone of proximal development' in years. To do this, he needed a scheme of age periods, and a set of tasks that could diagnose the next age period without defining it. In this paper, we compare the age periods in his late lectures with Halliday's categories of logico-semantic expansion as used by three adolescent…

In this paper we report a large-scale developmental study of early productive vocabulary acquisition by 928 Chinese-speaking children aged between 1;0 and 2;6, using the Early Vocabulary Inventory for Mandarin Chinese (Hao, Shu, Xing & Li, 2008). The results show that: (i) social words, especially words for people, are the predominant type of…

Time is frequently expressed with spatial motion, using one of three different metaphor types: moving-time, moving-ego, and sequence-as-position. Previous work shows that children can understand and explain moving-time metaphors by age five (Ozcaliskan, 2005). In this study, we focus on all three metaphor types for time, and ask whether metaphor…

The shared features that characterize the noun categories that young children learn first are a formative basis of the human category system. To investigate the potential categorical information contained in the features of early-learned nouns, we examine the graph-theoretic properties of noun-feature networks. The networks are built from the…

In this paper we consider the perceptual and conceptual contributions that shape early word learning, using research on the "shape bias" as a case in point. In our view, conceptual, linguistic, social-pragmatic, and perceptual sources of information influence one another powerfully and continuously in the service of word learning throughout…

The influence of referent type (Objects vs. Actions) and within-category referent relationships (functionally similar vs. perceptually similar) upon acquisition of lexical concepts by 12 infants were examined. Ss acquired object words and concepts in greater numbers than action words and concepts, suggestive of differences in the underlying…

The relationship between early language and cognition was studied in 20 children between 1 and 2 years of age. Four cognitive areas were tested: object permanence, means-end, play, and imitation. Results indicated that specific cognitive skills seem temporarily associated with some linguistic abilities, although attainment of skills can be…

In three experiments, a multiple habituation paradigm was used to examine the ability of 7- and 9-month-old prelinguistic infants to form a natural, basic-level object category. Findings constitute independent evidence for the existence of a linguistically relevant nonlinguistic category prior to the onset of word comprehension. (SED)

Some of the findings of a longitudinal study of three infants between their 11th and 22nd months to document development of linguistic expression of the agent concept indicated that first vocalizations were inconsistently associated with nonverbal agentive behaviors and later mature utterances coded agent-action-recipient events. (MC)

Examines the development of infants' ability to begin recognizing novel referents of common object names. In particular, the present experiment investigated the development of 12- to 20-month-old infants' ability to infer that an unfamiliar but categorically related object can be designated by a newly learned name for the object class. (Author/RH)

The literature on how and when children acquire temporal concepts is reviewed in the context of the acquisition of time concepts by deaf children. The stages at which children acquire concepts of clock, calendar, historical time, and chronology, and effects of language acquisition are discussed. A more formal structure of temporal concepts in the…

Children's use of proforms in spoken descriptions of real situations was studied and compared with that of adults to explore possible developmental progressions in the use of indexical reference. A discourse distinction between situational and textual reference was applied to data from 6-year-old and 10-year-old children and from adults. Subjects…

Compares two types of semantic development (the acquisition of disappearance words and success-failure words) to performance on two types of cognitive tasks (object-permanence and means-ends tasks) among infants. (HOD)

Studies 40 children ages 1 to 3 with respect to stage 6 object permanence, representational language, and symbolic play. Examines methodological problems in investigations of Piaget's model of cognitive-linguistic relationships related to the definition of these variables and associated with the use of correlations for data analysis. (Author/CB)

Discusses a longitudinal study of children's evolving concept of "word." Concludes that tacit awareness of word in spoken and written language precedes explicit awareness. Finds that children in different developmental stages perform differently on reading tasks. Suggests that development of the concept of word relates to experience with writing…