Children's acquisition of NP-type nouns: Evidence for semantic constraints on productivity

Abstract

Two major questions regarding the acquisition of nominals concern (1) whether children are productive in their categorisations of novel nouns; and (2) the relative role of syntax and semantics in such categorisations. The present research extends previous work on noun subcategories by focusing on a new category of noun, that of NP-type nouns. These are nouns that alternate between NP-type noun readings and count noun readings (e.g., "school" in "He is in school" and in "He is in the school"), with resulting changes in their semantic interpretation. We propose that children are productive in their categorisations of such nouns, and in addition that they rely primarily on semantic criteria when categorising novel NP-type nouns. As a test of these proposals, two studies were conducted in which 5-year-old children were read stories including novel count nouns and novel NP-type nouns. The semantic and syntactic properties of the nominals were manipulated and the children's categorisations were evaluated through grammaticality judgement tasks. In both studies, the two types of nominals were categorised on the basis of semantic information alone, although syntactic information that was consistent with the semantic information was helpful. In addition, the second study extended the results of the first to demonstrate that syntactic information that was inconsistent with the semantic information was ignored. These results were taken as support for the semantic theories of the acquisition of the nominal subcategories and for the specific semantic criteria proposed.