"This volume presents the state of the art of recent research on the acquisition of semantics. Covering topics ranging from infants' initial acquisition of word meaning to the more sophisticated mapping between structure and meaning in the syntax-semantics interface, and the relation between logical content and inferences on language meaning (semantics and pragmatics), the papers in this volume introduce the reader to the variety of ways in which children come to realize that semantic content is encoded in word meaning (for example, in the event semantics of the verbal domain or the scope of logical operators), and at the level of the sentence, which requires the composition of semantic meaning. The authors represent some of the most established and promising researchers in this domain, demonstrating collective expertise in a range of methodologies and topics relevant to the acquisition of semantics. This volume will serve as a valuable resource for students and faculty, and junior and seasoned researchers alike"--.

• Semantics in Language Acquisition
• Editorial page
• Title page
• LCC data
• Table of contents
• Chapter 1. The historical emergence and current study of semantics in acquisition
  • References
• Section I. Lexical meaning
• Chapter 2. Word meanings and semantic domains in acquisition
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Acquiring word meanings
    • 2.1 The first step: Fast mapping
  • 3. Conceptual and social sources of information
    • 3.1 Conceptual sources for word meanings
    • 3.2 Social sources for word meanings
  • 4. Accumulating words
  • 5. Setting up semantic domains
    • 5.1 Some semantic domains
  • 6. Structure within semantic domains
  • 7. Elaborated domains and islands of expertise
  • 8. Conclusion
  • References
    • Additional resources
• Chapter 3. The influence of linguistic temporal organization on children’s understanding of temporal terms and concepts
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Experiment 1
    • 2.1 Participants
    • 2.2 Stimuli
    • 2.3 Procedures
    • 2.4 Coding
    • 2.5 Results
    • 2.6 Discussion
  • 3. Experiment 2
    • 3.1 Participants
    • 3.2 Stimuli and procedures
    • 3.3 Results
    • 3.4 Discussion
  • 4. General discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix of supplementary resources
• Chapter 4. Semantic features of early verb vocabularies
  • 1. Introduction
    • 1.1 Our dataset: Data from the language development survey (Rescorla, 1989)
  • 2. Methods
    • 2.1 Participants
    • 2.2 Verbs
    • 2.3 Semantic dimensions
    • 2.4 Covariates
  • 3. Results
    • 3.1 Manner vs. result
    • 3.2 Durative vs. punctual
    • 3.3 Number of obligatory event participants
  • 4. Discussion
    • 4.1 Summary of results
    • 4.2 Limitations and future directions
  • Acknowledgement
  • References
• Section II. Event semantics
• Chapter 5. On the acquisition of event culmination
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The grammatical dimensions of event culmination
  • 3. Non-culmination patterns and the acquisition of the lexical meaning of verbs
  • 4. Non-culmination patterns and the acquisition of telicity
  • 5. Non-culmination patterns and the acquisition of perfectivity
  • 6. Conclusions and new developments in the acquisition of event culmination
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix A. Samples of experimental materials for testing the culmination entailment
  • Appendix B. Overview of verbs tested in nine telicity studies
  • Appendix C. Overview of grammatical aspect acquisition studies
• Chapter 6. Telicity in typical and impaired acquisition
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Semantic and pragmatic construal of telicity
    • 2.1 Event structure of verbs
    • 2.2 Encoding telicity in German: A note on verb particles and particle verbs
    • 2.3 Inherent and compositional telicity
  • 3. The acquisitional perspective
    • 3.1 The acquisition task of mastering telicity
    • 3.2 Learning strategy for verbs: Event structural bootstrapping
    • 3.3 Predictions for acquisition of German
  • 4. Telicity in production
  • 5. Telicity in comprehension
    • 5.1 A note on children with SLI and semantic deficits
    • 5.2 Inherent telicity
    • 5.3 Compositional telicity
  • 6. Conclusion and outlook
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Section III. Syntactic structure and semantic meaning
• Chapter 7. Not all subjects are agents: Transitivity and meaning in early language comprehension
  • 1. Introduction
    • 1.1 Abstract vs. concrete representations of language experience
    • 1.2 The semantics of subjects and objects
    • 1.3 The present research
  • 2. Experiment 1
    • 2.1 Method
    • 2.2 Results and discussion
  • 3. Experiment 2
    • 3.1 Method
    • 3.2 Results and discussion
  • 4. General discussion
  • Acknowledgments
  • References
• Chapter 8. Analogical structure mapping and the formation of abstract constructions: A novel construction learning study
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Method
    • 2.1 Participants
    • 2.2 Materials and procedure
  • 3. Results
    • 3.1 Manipulation check
  • 4. Discussion
  • References
• Chapter 9. The labeling problem in syntactic bootstrapping: Main clause syntax in the acquisition of propositional attitude verbs
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Approaches to the labeling problem
  • 3. Our proposal
  • 4. Implementing our proposal
    • 4.1 Base model
    • 4.2 Implementing abstract projection rules and featural anchors
    • 4.3 Learning algorithm
  • 5. Experiment
    • 5.1 Data
    • 5.2 Fitting
    • 5.3 Results
    • 5.4 Discussion
  • 6. General discussion
  • 7. Conclusion
  • References
• Chapter 10. Perspectives on truth: The case of language and false belief reasoning
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Points of view
    • 2.1 Personal pronouns
    • 2.2 Spatial deixis
    • 2.3 Demonstrative deixis
    • 2.4 Personal taste adjectives
    • 2.5 Opinion adverbs
    • 2.6 Designators
    • 2.7 Evidentials
  • 3. Conversation and perspective
  • 4 Embedded complements
    • 4.1 Propositional attitudes
    • 4.2 Infant theory of mind
    • 4.3 When do complements emerge?
  • 5. Point of view across clauses
    • 5.1 Truth and tense
    • 5.2 Deixis
    • 5.3 Reference and description
    • 5.4 Summary
  • 6. Implications
  • 7. Is linguistic encoding required?
  • 8. Conclusion
  • References
• Section IV. Logical interpretations
• Chapter 11. The meaning of question words in statements in child Mandarin
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Non-interrogative uses of question words in English
  • 3. Wh-questions are derived from existential structures
  • 4. Wh-questions are semantically equivalent to existential statements
  • 5. Two analyses of polarity sensitive expressions
  • 6. The conjunctive/universal interpretation of ∃-expressions
  • 7. Question words in mandarin
  • 8. The basic meaning of mandarin question words
  • 9. Experiment 1: Question words as existential expressions
  • 10. Experiment 2: Question words in the antecedent of conditionals
  • 11. Experiment 3: Question words license conjunctive/universal inferences
  • 12. Conclusion
  • References
• Chapter 12. Overt, covert, and clandestine operations: Ambiguity and ellipsis in acquisition
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Terminological background and selected case studies
    • 2.1 Overt operation
    • 2.2 Covert operation
    • 2.3 Clandestine operation
    • 2.4 Three case studies
  • 3. Case 1: Questions involving wh-phrases and universal quantifiers
    • 3.1 Theoretical background
    • 3.2 Evidence from child language acquisition
  • 4. Case 2: Embedded antecedent-contained deletion (ACD)
    • 4.1 Theoretical background
    • 4.2 Evidence from child language acquisition
  • 5. Case 3: Pronominal reference in comparatives
    • 5.1 Theoretical background
    • 5.2 Evidence from child language acquisition
  • 6. Conclusion
  • References
  • Funding Information
• Section V. The relation between semantics and pragmatics
• Chapter 13. Developmental insights into gappy phenomena: Comparing presupposition, implicature, homogeneity, and vagueness
  • 1. Introduction
    • 1.1 The phenomena
    • 1.2 The starting point
  • 2. Presupposition and implicature
    • 2.1 Theoretical background
    • 2.2 Experiment: Bill, Romoli, Schwarz, & Crain (2016)
    • 2.3 Implications
  • 3. Homogeneity and implicature
    • 3.1 Theoretical background
    • 3.2 Experiment: Tieu, Križ & Chemla (2015)
    • 3.3 Implications
  • 4. Presupposition and vagueness
    • 4.1 Theoretical background
    • 4.2 Experimental background
    • 4.3 Potential insights from acquisition
  • 5. General discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Chapter 14. Four-year-old children compute scalar implicatures in absence of epistemic reasoning
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Experiment 1
    • 2.1 Method
    • 2.2 Results
  • 3. Experiment 2
    • 3.1 Method
    • 3.2 Results
  • 4. General discussion
  • Acknowledgement
  • References
  • Correspondence Information
  • Funding Information
• Chapter 15. The acquisition path of near-reflexivity
  • 1. Introduction
    • 1.1 Innate interfaces and theory within experimentation
  • 2. Metonymy, proxy readings and near-reflexives
    • 2.1 Morphological constraints on near-reflexivity
    • 2.2 The syntax and semantics of near-reflexivity
  • 3. Mapping reflexives to partitions
  • 4. The acquisition challenge
    • 4.1 Homogeneous and heterogeneous partitions
  • 5. Experimental studies
    • 5.1 Experiment 1: Near-reflexives in child Italian
    • 5.2 Experiment 2: Pilot English data
    • 5.3 Near-reflexives in English
  • 6. Discussion
  • 7. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgement
  • References
  • Funding information
• Subject index
• Language index
• Author index