Word classes and psycholinguistics

Abstract

Although there has been a lot of work on the acquisition of word classes in English, far less has been done for the Romance languages. In this chapter, we aim at introducing the acquisition of lexical words on one side and logical operators on the other. Regarding lexical words, we focus on the acquisition path of nouns and verbs in infants and young children. Some results are available for vocabulary growth in the age range of 3 to 6 years and we also explore the emergence of word knowledge in infants, which is earlier than previously thought. While no cross-linguistic variation is expected in the acquisition of lexical words like nouns and verbs, the acquisition of logical operators appears to be subject to variation. We discuss the acquisition of connectives and quantifiers and their relation to other operators, such as negation.