The Semantics of Children's Language

Interest in language, especially that of children, has become a central concern of contemporary psychology- This interest is somewhat surprising, because everyone recognizes the enormous complexity of language use and language development >in the child. . In spite of a widespread recognition that there is little hope of having a complete theory of these matters at any time in the near future, a general air of activity and in some cases of optimism prevails about the progress being made. For example, it is now possible to cite a fairly large number of references in the literature on almost any aspect of language development in the child, ranging from phonology to semantic comprehension, with probably the largest number of studies being on the syntactical or grammatical development of children’s language. It is surely in this area that the most progress has been made over the past decade or decade and a half.