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

Two major questions regarding the acquisition of nominals concern (1) wheth er children are productive in their categorisations of novel nouns; and (2) the relative role of syntax and semantics in such categorisations. The pre sent 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 t heir semantic interpretation. We propose that children are productive in th eir categorisations of such nouns, and in addition that they rely primarily on semantic criteria when categorising novel NP-type nouns. As a test of t hese proposals, two studies were conducted in which 5-year-old children wer e read stories including novel count nouns and novel NP-type nouns. The sem antic and syntactic properties of the nominals were manipulated and the chi ldren's categorisations were evaluated through grammaticality judgement tas ks. In both studies, the two types of nominals were categorised on the basi s of semantic information alone, although syntactic information that was co nsistent with the semantic information was helpful. In addition, the second study extended the results of the first to demonstrate that syntactic info rmation that was inconsistent with the semantic information was ignored. Th ese results were taken as support for the semantic theories of the acquisit ion of the nominal subcategories and for the specific semantic criteria pro posed.