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seeing a toy car in it she says car; taking i::'..'. the ear out she says out; putting it on the floor she says down. In the world at large these little remarks do not command much attention. But to people i interested in how children learn to talk, the first steps into language raise fas- :7' "? elnating and difficult questions. In this chapter, we are concerned with the enal puzzle of where children's early word meanings come from. Are they ' introduced through language? Do they reflect concepts that arise spontane~ -. ously through infants' perceptual and cognitive development? Do language ":.: and cognition interact to produce early word meanings, and, if so, how? ",..., The idea that children learn how to structure meanings through exposure to language is' usually associated with Whorl (1956). Whorf stressed that ':: languages differ in the way they partition the world, and he proposed that in learning the semantic categories of their language, children also acquire a 'world vie

Abstract. This paper proposes an account of the acquisition of grammatical relations using the basic concepts of connectionism and a construction-based theory of grammar. Many previous accounts of first-language acquisition assume that grammatical relations (e.g., the grammatical subject and object of a sentence) and linking rules are universal and innate; this is necessary to provide a first set of assumptions in the target language to allow deductive processes to test hypotheses and/or set parameters. In contrast to this approach, we propose that grammatical relations emerge rather late in the language-learning process. Our theoretical proposal is based on two observations. First, early production of childhood speech is formulaic and becomes systematic in a progressive fashion. Second, grammatical relations themselves are family-resemblance categories that cannot be described by a single parameter. This leads to the notion that grammatical relations are learned in a bottom up fashion. Combining this theoretical position with the notion that the main purpose of language is communication, we demonstrate the emergence of the notion of “subject ” in a simple recurrent network that learns to map from sentences to semantic roles. We analyze the hidden layer representations of the emergent subject, and demonstrate that these representations correspond to a radially–structured category. We also claim that the pattern of generalization and undergeneralization demonstrated by the network conforms to what we expect from the data on children’s generalizations. 1

We describe a computational model of the acquisition of early grammatical constructions that exploits two essential features of the human language learner: significant prior knowledge of concepts and individual lexical items, and sensitivity to the statistical properties of the input data. Such principles, previously applied to lexical acquisition, are shown to be useful and necessary for learning the structured mappings between form and meaning needed to represent phrasal and clausal constructions. We describe an algorithm based on Bayesian model merging that can induce a set of grammatical constructions based on simpler previously learned constructions in combination with new utterance-situation pairs. The resulting model shows how cognitive and computational constraints can intersect to produce a course of learning consistent with data from studies of child language acquisition.

Previous research has shown that children go through a stage in which they know that the number words each refer to a distinct numerosity, yet do not know which numerosity each number word picks out (Wynn, 1992). How do children attain this level of knowledge? We explore the possibility that particular properties of how number words are used within sentences inform children of the semantic class to which they belong. An analysis of transcripts of the spontaneous speech of three one- and two-year-old children and their parents (from the CHILDES database; MacWhinney & Snow, 1990) suggests that the relevant cues are available as input in parents ’ speech to children, and that children generally honour these properties of number words in their own speech. Implications of this proposal for word learning more generally are discussed.

Abstract. We propose to model the development of language by a series of formal grammars, accounting for the linguistic capacity of children at the very early stages of mastering language. This approach provides a testbed for evaluating theories of language acquisition, in particular with respect to the extent to which innate, language-specific mechanisms must be assumed. Specifically, we focus on a single child learning English and use the CHILDES corpus for actual performance data. We describe a set of grammars which account for this child’s utterances between the ages 1;8.02 and 2;0.30. The coverage of the grammars is carefully evaluated by extracting grammatical relations from induced structures and comparing them with manually annotated labels. 1

This work investigates children’s early semantic representations of gradable adjectives (GAs) and proposes that infants perform a probabilistic analysis of the input to learn about abstract differences within this category. I first demonstrate that children as young as age three distinguish between relative (e.g., big, long), maximum standard absolute (e.g., full, straight), and minimum standard absolute (e.g., spotted, bumpy) GAs in the way that the standard of comparison is set and how it interacts with the discourse context. I then ask if adverbs enable infants to learn these differences. In a corpus analysis, I demonstrate that statistically significant patterns of adverbial modification are available to the language learner: restricted adverbs (e.g., completely) are more likely than non-restricted adverbs (e.g., very) to select for maximal GAs with bounded scales. Non-maximal GAs, which are more likely to be modified by adverbs in general, are more likely to be modified by a narrower range, predominantly composed of intensifiers (e.g., very). I then ask if language learners recruit this information when learning new adjectives. In a word learning task employing the preferential looking paradigm, I demonstrate that 30-month-olds use adverbial modifiers they are not necessarily producing to assign an interpretation to novel adjectives. Adjectives modified by completely are assigned an

commentaries were prompted by our article ‘‘On the Origins of Naming and Other Symbolic Behavior’’ (1996), which was, in turn, followed by 26 commentaries and a reply. In the course of the present reply, we further develop the naming account to embrace more complex verbal relations such as same, different, more, and less. We also examine what we see as the lack of conceptual coherence in equivalence theories, including relational frame theory, and the disparities between these accounts and the findings from empirical research.

ii SUSANNAH KIRBY: Semantics or Subcases? The Acquisition of

Women are better than men at verbal memory tasks, such as remembering word lists. These tasks depend on declarative memory. The declarative/procedural model of language, which posits that the lexicon of stored words is part of declarative memory, while grammatical composition of complex forms depends on procedural memory, predicts a female superiority in aspects of lexical memory. Other neurocognitive models of language have not made this prediction. Here we examine the prediction in past-tense over-regularizations (e.g. holded) produced by children. We expected that girls would remember irregular past-tense forms (held) better than boys, and thus would over-regularize less. To our surprise, girls over-regularized far more than boys. We investigated potential explanations for this sex difference. Analyses showed that in girls but not boys, over-regularization rates correlated with measures of the number of similar-sounding regulars (folded, molded). This sex difference in phonological neighborhood effects is taken to suggest that girls tend to produce over-regularizations in associative lexical memory, generalizing over stored neighboring regulars, while boys are more likely to depend upon rule-governed affixation (hold +-ed). The finding is consistent with the hypothesis that, likely due to their superior lexical abilities, females tend to retrieve from memory complex forms (walked) that men generally compose with the grammatical system (walk +-ed). The results suggest that sex may be an important factor in the acquisition and computation of language.