Syntactic form, semantic complexity, and short-term memory: Influences on children's acquisition of new linguistic structures.

30 children at 5 age levels (2–6 yrs) were exposed to novel actions involving 1, 2, or 3 semantic features. Simultaneously, they were taught novel labels for these actions. The labels marked the semantic features syntactically, with either a suffix, a prefix, or both a suffix and a prefix. In posttests Ss had to either supply the appropriate label for an action or produce an appropriate action for a label. Results show that (a) semantic complexity affected the difficulty of producing actions but not labels, (b) syntactic complexity affected the difficulty of producing labels but not actions, (c) there was an age below which little learning was evident on either test, (d) short-term memory (STM) was a better predictor of performance than was age, and (e) the STM value associated with each item corresponded approximately to the number of features, syntactic or semantic, that had to be processed to produce the form in question. (14 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)