A Special Issue in Honor of Katherine Nelson
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in which members share little in common perceptually. Food consists simply of those items that play a certain role in children's breakfast, lunch, and dinner scripts. In an especially well-known study, Lucariello, Kyratzis, and Nelson (1992) asked preschool children of various ages to provide specific items for five super-ordinate categories: food, clothes, animals, furniture, and tools. The first three of these in particular were hypothesized to have slot-filler structure because of their participation in salient events in children's lives, and indeed, it was found that the basis for each of these categories for young children was the similar events in which its exemplars participated. There was also evidence that the older children formed these categories on the basis of more different types of events than younger children. Subsequent research has shown that children can form both syntagmatic and paradigmatic categories from their initial event representations (see Nelson, 1996, for a review). Nelson is one of the only theorists of children's language development who has gone onto focus on the nature of children's lexical development later in the preschool period (the one major exception being Anglin, 1977,1983). Briefly, the idea is that by establishing lexical fields of similar terms, children construct relations such as synonymy, antonymy, and hy pony my (hierarchical relations). The establishment of these relations makes possible "the manipulation of language terms without refer-ence to situational context" (Nelson, 1985, p. 214); that is, children establish lexical relations among words, "unencumbered by all of the syntagmatic entailments of the conceptual system" (Nelson, 1985, p. 214). Establishing these kinds of abstract rela-tions enables children to, among other things, perform in adult-like ways in explicit verbal classification tasks as they approach school age. It is only at this point that Nelson is willing to say that children have "a system of semantic relations that is purely symbolic and semiautonomous, that is, it can operate independently of the conceptual system" (Nelson, 1985, p. 214). Strong evidence for this proposal was re-cently supplied by Sell (1992). In a study of children ranging in age from 2 to 10 years, she found that the youngest children seemed to possess mainly categories based in specific events. The slightly older children (5-6 years of age) possessed, in addition, slot-filler categories based on participant roles in whole classes of events. It was only the oldest, school-aged children, who possessed fully taxonomic concep-tual categories independent of specific events and event types. With respect to the grammatical structure of language, Tomasello (1992a) used Nelson's event-based model to explicate some aspects of children's early multi-word productions. The hypothesis was that the basic structure of children's earliest multiword utterances is provided by verbs. The defining feature of verbs is of course the dynamic and sequential nature of their underlying conceptualizations; they refer to events and states of affairs. Moreover, the meaning of a verb perforce includes participant roles such as agent and patient as an integral component. For example, the meaning of the verb give includes the giver, the thing given, and the person given to as they engage in certain activities. Children's understanding and

2002 ◽  
pp. 13-26
Keyword(s):  
Basic Structure ◽  
Conceptual System ◽  
Older Children ◽  
Grammatical Structure ◽  
Lexical Development ◽  
Initial Event ◽  
Participant Roles ◽  
The One ◽  
Event Based ◽  
Event Representations
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