In two experiments, preschoolers interpreted a novel count noun applied to an unfamiliar stuffed animal as referring to a basic-level (such as a person or a dog) kind of object rather than to a context (such as a passenger) or a life-phase (such as a puppy) kind of object. (MDM)

This article explores the kinds of cues young children use as a basis for extending early works in an effort to label novel referent objects. Proposals that intend to explain how first words are extended and used to refer to objects or events for which no words explicitly exist are discussed. (DF)

The pragmatic and semantic categories used by Ss varied across age groups. Results are discussed with regard to age, expressive modality, mean length of utterances, and hearing loss. There was much variation among these parameters in communicative development across Ss. (Author/DLS)

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of varying the semantic content of active and passive sentences along a dimension of "personalness" on the comprehension of those sentences by preschool age children. The study focuses on a current linguistic controversy dealing with the relative adequacy of syntax-based and…

The intent of this study was to examine the development of three aspects of preschoolers' private speech: coefficients of egocentricism, the extent to which speech regulates actions, and the syntactic and semantic structures of individual utterances. Forty-one randomly chosen preschoolers (26 females, 15 males) were placed in three age groups (3,…

Two experiments indicating that children's linguistic generalizational biases change from a semantically-based system to a syntactical-structural system provide evidence for a semantic-relational bias in children's early grammars and support the notion that children's generalizational biases shift from a semantic-relational basis to a…

A study of the signing of six deaf preschoolers found that they produced phonological and morphological errors, and semantic overgeneralizations, comparable to those made by hearing children when learning to speak. This suggests that deaf children actively construct sign language rules in the same way that hearing children build up the rules of…