Children tend to regularize their productions when exposed to artificial languages, an advantageous response to unpredictable variation. But generalizations in natural languages are typically conditioned by factors that children ultimately learn. In two experiments, adult and six-year-old learners witnessed two novel classifiers, probabilistically…

This study adopted Ambridge's research paradigm to examine the effects of entrenchment, preemption, and verb semantics in second language (L2) acquisition of English "un-" prefixation. Three groups of Chinese learners of English (second- and fourth-year English majors and teachers of English) rated the acceptability of 48 "un-"…

Language acquisition involves learning not only grammatical rules and a lexicon but also what people are intending to convey with their utterances: the semantic/pragmatic component of language. In this article we separate the contributions of linguistic development and cognitive maturity to the acquisition of the semantic/pragmatic component of…

This dissertation studies the acquisition of verb argument structure in the basilectal subvariety of Jakarta Indonesian (henceforth, bJI). There are two characteristics of bJI that potentially affect the acquisition of verb argument structure. First, bJI sentences can surface not only in the full frame but also in truncated frames. Second, the…

A study was conducted in which a series of stories was used to teach six four- to five-year-olds to identify objects as "nouns," attributes of objects as "adjectives," and actions as "verbs." All the children appeared to have well-formed semantic fields for the three form classes. (Author/RM)

This paper examines possible interchanges between cognitive and language processes with particular attention given to concept formation and semantic language development. Aspects of psychological and contemporary linguistic theories are discussed as a way to interrelate the functions of thought and language. The author concludes that while…

Presents a "procedural view" of the learning mind, arguing against previous theories citing physical properties as its basis. A more process-oriented view of information processing is offered, which describes "mind" in terms of skill in manipulating symbols, and the notion of skills is shown to provide a useful framework for accounting for…

This study is an attempt to investigate the efficacy of using existing semantic relations categories for understanding how children comprehend the verb "with" + noun construction. (Author)

The attribution of function of various kinds to elements of child speech is discussed, and the question of the validity of the interpretations on which such attribution rests is explored with reference to Halliday's work on the development of meaning. (Author)

Noam Chomsky's theory of grammar, or more specifically his theory of syntax, proposes to describe all possible English sentences through an explanation of how the native speaker generates sentences. It is the study of one's competence that offers insights into how language is acquired and how the rules and generalizations of that language are…

The arguments for and against viewing the child's initial one-word utterances as holophrases are reviewed. An alternative view of early language development, which takes the speech act as the basic unit of linguistic communication, rather than the sentence, is offered as a solution to the holophrase controversy. (Author/RM)

This paper attempts to demonstrate that: (a) syntax is dependent on factors of cognitive and non-cognitive meaning; and (b) criteria for linguistic competence can only be fully met when full command of cognitive and non-cognitive meaning is present. Results have implications for future models of language and language acquisition. (CHK)

Earlier version of this article was presented at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, December 28, 1968. (VM)

The present study is an attempt to apply a paradigm to the shift of verbal behavior before and after the age of seven in order to see if linguistic contexts affect verbal behavior differentially before seven or after seven. (Author/CFM)

The language a child learns from and attends to is the speech of significant persons in his world, addressed to each other and to him. As the child gradually participates in this social interaction he learns communicative competence, i.e., the nonconscious, tacit knowledge that underlies speech behavior--knowledge of both the language and the…