Biomedical subjects
M Maratsos
Publications and source records attributed to M Maratsos.
More overregularizations after all: new data and discussion on Marcus, Pinker, Ullman, Hollander, Rosen & Xu.
Marcus, Pinker, Ullman, Hollander, Rosen & Xu (1992) claim that when the irregular past form of a verb is known, it is immediately known to be the correct form, such that over-regularizations only occur as speech errors, not as a genuine grammatical alternative; as a result, they argue, over-regularization rates are, when carefully inspected, very low. In the present paper: (1) it is shown that even if over-regularizations are a genuine grammatical alternative, overall rates in samples would still be low for most children; (2) careful analysis shows evidence for substantial over-regularization periods in three longitudinal subjects ages 2;5-5;2 (Abe), 2;3-5;2 (Adam) and 2;3-5;0 (Sarah); (3) Abe's much higher rates follow from general developments in his past tense acquisition, in ways not consonant with Marcus et al.'s formulations.
A sunny view of polarization.
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On having complex representations of things: preschoolers use multiple words for objects and people.
Applying several names to an entity (polynomy) reflects the ability to categorize entities in different ways. Two experiments demonstrate preschoolers' abilities to apply multiple labels to representational objects and to people. In Experiment 1, 3- and 4-year-olds labeled representational objects and verified labels for story characters. In both tasks children reliably produced or accepted several words per entity and accepted a high percentage of both class-inclusive and overlapping word pairs. These results were replicated in Experiment 2; 3- to 5-year-olds also completed appearance-reality and receptive vocabulary tests. The mean number of words produced in the labeling task was significantly related to receptive vocabulary, but not to appearance-reality performance. The results indicate that preschoolers represent an entity as belonging to multiple categories (e.g., dinosaur and crayon). Implications for cognitive and language development, particularly the appearance-reality distinction and the mutual exclusivity bias, are discussed.
Language specificity and elasticity: brain and clinical syndrome studies.
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Semantic restrictions on children's passives.
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