SPOONING AND BASKETING - CHILDRENS DEALING WITH ACCIDENTAL GAPS IN THE LEXICON

The abilities of 2-, 5- and 7-yr-old children to interpret, judge the acceptability of and produce class extensions were assessed. Class extensions are linguistic constructions in which a word that normally functions as a member of 1 syntactic category is used as a member of another, as in the sentence He is pianoing Christimas songs. Subjects in each age group understood sentences containing class extensions to some extent. The 2-yr-olds'' performance was depressed relative to the near-maximal performance of the older subjects, because they were generally insensitive to word-order cues in the stimulus sentences. Only the 7-yr-olds consistently judged sentences containing class extensions to be deviant; the 5-yr-old confused syntax and semantics in making their judgements. The 7-yr-olds were also able to produce class-extension phrases on demand more frequently than the 5-yr-olds. The increasing ability with age to deal appropriately with class extensions is primarily due to general advances in language acquisition rather than to any development unique to the class-extension word-formation process. The pattern of results reported, as well as observations that chidren''s use of class extensions in spontaneous speech declines with age, may both be accounted for if word-formation rules are assumed to be nonproductive, general rules, with a generative component and a later-acquired inhibitory component.