Syntactic categories II

Abstract This chapter leverages research on links between syntactic categories and the sorts of concepts they name to establish when children have knowledge of the categories N(oun) and Adj(ective). In particular, nouns tend to name kind concepts (“things”), whereas adjectives tend to name properties. The chapter discusses a series of experiments demonstrating that children as young as 14 months old understand this fact and use it to help guide word learning, which in turn suggests that 14-month-olds have access to the relevant syntactic categories. In this context, the chapter also discusses the nature of nonlinguistic conceptual categories as well as the link between linguistic and conceptual categories more generally. Establishing the answer to such “when” questions paves the way for later answering “how” questions (e.g., how did children come to have knowledge of syntactic categories like noun and adjective?).