In 'Against Stored Abstractions,' Ambridge uses neural and computational evidence to make his case against abstract representations. He argues that storing only exemplars is more parsimonious -- why bother with abstraction when exemplar models with on-the-fly calculation can do everything abstracting models can and more -- and implies that his…

Ambridge argues that there is widespread agreement among child language researchers that learners store linguistic abstractions. In this commentary the authors first argue that this assumption is incorrect; anti-representationalist/exemplar views are pervasive in theories of child language. Next, the authors outline what has been learned from this…

There are numerous models of how speech segmentation may proceed in infants acquiring their first language. We present a framework for considering the relative merits and limitations of these various approaches. We then present a model of speech segmentation that aims to reveal important sources of information for speech segmentation, and to…

On the basis of an analysis of several earlier classifications of language functions a three-dimensional classification is presented. It interprets the utterance in question in terms of 1) the speaker's intended influence on the listener, 2) the speaker's intentions and attitudes, and 3) the speaker's intentions with respect to the content of the…

Children aged three to five were the subjects of two studies of the development of ability to classify diverse objects into superordinate categories. In the first experiment, subjects were asked to designate two of three pictorially represented objects as representative of a given category. The second experiment required subjects to choose from a…

This paper examines the validity of diagnostic categories frequently used to classify children with severe language disorders by determining the relationship of the categories to independently derived developmental, psychological, and medical variables. It is argued that the classification systems currently available too often fail to achieve the…

The paper examines the nominal lexicon in later language acquisition as a window on linguistic knowledge and usage across childhood and adolescence. The paper presents a psycholinguistically motivated and cognitively grounded analysis of the distribution of ten semantic noun categories (the Noun Scale) across development, modality, and genre.…

This paper explores the relation between the communicative and categorical functions of language and the acquisition of language production. Three major factors in language acquisition are communication, ability for representation and the process of categorization. This paper offers evidence that a sudden and dramatic increase in lexical skill…