Using Morphosyntacticand Contextual Cues in Child Conceptual Development

Studies on child language acquisition show that in the lexical development process، generic concept has a significant function، as it has a determining role in the formation of skills such as extension and categorization of concepts. The present research aims to investigate the production and comprehension abilities of generic nouns، as well as the developmental patterns in two age groups (4-5 and 5-6 years) of 16 monolingual Persian-speaking children. To achieve this goal، we used two experiments، a morphological experiment (adopted fromCimpian&Markman، 2008) involving different linguistic contexts (with generic، non-generic and neutral concepts)، and a syntactic experiment (adopted from Cimpian، Meltzer &Markman، 2011). Analysis of the data indicated that children as young as 4 were capable of using morphosyntactic and contextual cues to construe the concept of “kind” in the form of generic noun، and distinguish between generic and non-generic sentences. The comparison of the children’s performance in the two age groups demonstrated that they did not have any significant difference in processing generic noun phrases. The findings also confirmed that in addition to employing morphosyntactic cues، the subjects also used linguistic context to differentiate generic from non-generic nouns.