Search

In response to Kidd and Garcia's survey that shows the paucity of authors and languages from the Global South in four leading journals of language acquisition, I argue that Mayan language acquisition has contributed in important ways to test theories in the field at large. I specifically outline major contributions from Mayan Tzotzil acquisition to topics of input, lexical, semantic and morphological development. Research on Mesoamerican languages is invaluable in understanding the implications of linguistic typology in language acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors conducted three experiments examining the effect of grouping on children's generalization of animal labels. In Experiment 1 (N = 96), first graders (M age = 6 years, 10 months) who had seen a novel animal grouped with similar animals generalized its trained label more broadly than those who had seen it by itself or grouped with dissimilar animals. Generalization of artifact labels was unaffected by condition. In Experiment 2, 4-year-olds (N = 96) also showed this pattern, but 3-year-olds (N = 96) showed no effects. In Experiment 3 (N = 48), 4-year-olds again showed the effect for animal labels in a design that eliminated alternatives to a grouping explanation. At least by age 4, children tend to judge that members of a group of similar animals belong to the same category, and this judgment affects how they interpret a label that is introduced for a member of the group. Explanations for why children tend to make these judgments and the implications for accounts of children's word learning are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three experiments examined whether the experience of individuating an object would affect the way that children of different ages would interpret its label. Participants were asked to remember a novel object and pick it out from sets containing either two similar objects (similar condition) or no similar objects (dissimilar condition). They were then taught a label for the object and tested for how broadly they generalized it. Because children in the similar condition had formed a more detailed representation of the object, they were expected to generalize its label less broadly. For artifacts, this effect was observed in 4- and 5-year-olds as well as first and second graders, but not in 3-year-olds or adults. For toy animals, no age group showed this effect, and the three oldest groups of children showed the opposite effect. Various explanations for why the consequences of individuating an object for the interpretation of its label depend on age of the learner and the object’s ontological kind are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important question in verb learning is how children extend new verbs to new situational contexts. In Study 1, two-and-a-half-year-old children were shown a complex event followed by new events that preserved only the action from the initial event, only the result, or no new events. Children seeing events that preserved either the action or the result produced appropriate verb extensions at test while children without this information did not. In a follow-up study, children hearing new verbs produced more extensions than did children hearing non-labeling speech. These studies suggest that attention to related events is helpful to young verb learners, perhaps because they structurally align these events during verb learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children aged 2 through 6 years and adults were shown a series of pictures including 'normal' referents (e.g., cat or car), and unfamiliar combination tokens (e.g., a clock with a telephone handset), which they were asked to identify. There were age-dependent differences in terms of naming (i.e., the number of words and morphemes and linguistic constructions) and criteria for category membership. The older participants used more morphemes and sophisticated linguistic strategies (e.g., descriptive phrases) than the younger participants, and the younger children showed a greater tendency to rely on holistic shape as a category determiner. These disparities suggested that the participants not only employed different strategies by age, but that they also had different criteria for categorization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two studies, we explored 5-year-olds' and adults' beliefs about entities that receive reference by proper names. In Study 1 we used two tasks: (1) a listing task in which participants stated what things in the world can and cannot receive proper names, and (2) an explanation task in which they explained why some things merit proper names. Children's lists of proper namable things were more centred than adults' on living animate entities and their surrogates (e.g., dolls and stuffed animals). Both children's and adults' lists of non-namable things contained a predominance of artefacts. Both age groups offered similar explanations for proper namability, the most common of which pertained to the desire or need to identify objects as individuals (or to distinguish them from other objects). In Study 2 we replicated the main results of the Study 1 listing task, using a modified set of instructions. The findings establish a set of norms about the scope and coherence of children's and adults' concept of a proper namable entity, and they place constraints on an account of how children learn proper names (Macnamara, 1982, 1986). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]