Young children's concept of color and its relation to the acquisition of color words.

Many children experience great difficulty in learning their first color word. In contrast, once children have learned 1 color word, they learn additional color words more easily. This striking fact rises the question of whether children who do not know color words have conceptual color categories capable of supporting inferences about word meaning. In 3 experiments 2-year-olds were provided with tasks that required them to base inferences on color or to map things onto color. Half the children comprehended at least 1 color word, and the remaining children comprehended none. In all experiments, the children in both groups succeeded on the color tasks. It was argued that children who do not know color words have the conceptual foundation necessary to base inferences on color but have specific constraints against basing inferences about word meaning on color.

Evidence for a distinct kind of noun.

According to traditional accounts of the count/mass distinction, singular count nouns require a determiner. These accounts do not explain why certain count nouns (e.g., "camp" and "church") do not obey that rule. In this paper it is argued that these kinds of nouns are distinct from count nouns and, in fact, are lexical noun phrases. Thus, they are labelled "NP-type nouns". The spontaneous speech of four children and their parents was examined for the use of determiners with NP-type nouns and count nouns. It was shown that the parents made a clear distinction between the two kinds of nouns. That is, they omitted determiners with the NP-type nouns, but not with the count nouns. Each of the children made the same distinction by 4 years of age, and in two cases much earlier. Additionally, the children's use of adjectives was examined and it was found that they modified NP-type nouns as if they were noun phrases. It was concluded that NP-type nouns are represented as noun phrases and that children acquire the category as, or before, they acquire the count/mass distinction. The implications for theories of the count/mass distinction were discussed and additional questions concerning learnability and historical change were raised.

Ontological categories guide young children's inductions of word meaning: object terms and substance terms.

Three experiments assessed the possibility, suggested by Quine (1960, 1969) among others, that the ontology underlying natural language is induced in the course of language learning, rather than constraining learning from the beginning. Specifically, we assessed whether the ontological distinction between objects and non-solid substances conditions projection of word meanings prior to the child's mastery of count/mass syntax. Experiments 1 and 2 contrasted unfamiliar objects with unfamiliar substances in a word-learning task. Two-year-old subjects' projection of the novel word to new objects respected the shape and number of the original referent. In contrast, their projection of new words for non-solid substances ignored shape and number. There were no effects of the child's knowledge of count/mass syntax, nor of the syntactic context in which the new word was presented. Experiment 3 revealed that children's natural biases in the absence of naming do not lead to the same pattern of results. We argue that these data militate against Quine's conjecture.