“in ‘, “on”, and “under” revisited STEPHEN WILCOX DAVID S. PALERMO” The Pennsylvania State University Abstract zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA The present study presents evidence that young children S comprehension of’the locatives ‘in’, ‘on’, and ‘under’ is, at least in part, contextually determined. Children aged 1.63;0 were given tasks with verbal instructions which were either contextually congruent or incongruent, The results w ere interpreted in terms of’ the non-linguistic as well as linguistic strategies apparently used to interpret speech. The results and interpretation are in contrast to those oj’earlier research. In recent years a large amount of work has been directed toward shedding light upon the processes through which a child acquires the semantic system of his first language. One of the most consistent findings reported in the literature is that young children have a tendency to overgeneralize the use of words (e.g., Clark, 1973). For instance, a two year old child might use the word ‘dog’ to designate all animals or he might use ‘dad’ to refer to all men. This phenomenon has been reported for relational terms as well as for words referring to concrete objects. For example, Wales and Cambell (1970) and Clark (1973) found that when children are asked to give the antonyms for such words as tall, short, long, or narrow, they respond most often with one of the pair ‘big-wee/small’. Clark (1973) has attempted to account for these overgeneralizations (or overexten- sions) in terms of semantic features into which a given meaning may be analyzed. The features are assumed to be hierarchically ordered and the hypothesis is that initially the child interprets words only in terms of the most general features. These latter features are thought to be derived from the perceptual system of the child. As the child progresses, he gradually adds more specific features to his meanings for words. For example, at first the child would only know that a word such as ‘big’ refers to size. At this stage he would use ‘big’ to refer to all relations of size. A corollary of the semantic feature theory is that the child learns the positive or unmarked end of an antonym pair before he learns the negative or marked end, and at one stage in his linguistic development, he will take both members of an antonym pair to *We would like to thank C. N. Cofer for suggestions which led to this research. Reprint requests should be sent to the second author, 441 Moore Building, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802. zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCB Cognition 3(3/, pp. 245 - 254