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. I have been involved in several such grammatical studies myself (Suppes, 1970; Suppes, Smith, & Léveillé, 1972) ’ and I believe in the intrinsic merit of the diversified work that is going on all over the world. On the other hand, I do feel that too great an emphasis has been placed on grammar or syntax, and too little on semantics. I want to try to help redress the balance by making the case for an intensive study of the semantics of children’s speech. I shall be especially concerned to argue that there are as many conceptual and technica1 tools available for semantical analysis as there are