Children learn words in a social environment, facilitated in part by social cues from caregivers, such as eye-gaze and gesture. A common assumption is that social cues convey either perceptual or social information, depending on the age of the child. In this review of research on word learning and social cues during early childhood, we propose…

Carol Stoel-Gammon has made a real contribution in bringing together two fields that are not generally jointly addressed. Like Stoel-Gammon, we have long focused on individual differences in phonological development (e.g. Vihman, Ferguson & Elbert, 1986; Vihman, Boysson-Bardies, Durand & Sundberg, 1994; Keren-Portnoy, Majorano & Vihman, 2008). And…

Two studies used a new paradigm to examine preschool children's (i.e., 2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) word learning across multiple sense modalities. In Study 1 (n = 60), children heard a word for an object that they touched but did not see, while word learning was examined using objects that were seen but not touched. In Study 2 (n = 60), children…

Presents the goals of the Plunkett and Marchman (PM) connectionist model of the acquisition of verb morphology, and responds to related criticisms. Claims that small vocabulary size allows young children to correctly produce both regular and irregular past tense forms, and that non-linearities in vocabulary growth are a contributing factor to the…

Poses and answers several questions parents and teachers have about the value of invented spelling. (FL)

This study focuses on the semantic development of individual lexical items, as viewed from a semantic features perspective. It involves four narrow semantic domains, a sample of elementary school-children and their teachers, and two native language groups, English and Spanish. Semantic development is studied through the process of equivalence…

This paper reviews current literature concerning the development of children's comprehension of the processes of natural languages and it recommends a new study approach designed to evaluate the joint effects of lexical and syntactic devices on comprehension. It discusses three main kinds of investigations--studies of the comprehension of…

This paper proposes a broad outline of a variable model of language development and explores several particulars of such a model in the language behavior of four two-year-old children. The process by which information about language is progressively transformed and integrated rather than merely being added together can be seen in the shifting…

The collection of essays and studies concerning generative grammar and first and second language acquisition includes: "The Optional-Infinitive Stage in Child English: Evidence from Negation" (Tony Harris, Ken Wexler); "Towards a Structure-Building Model of Acquisition" (Andrew Radford); "The Underspecification of…