The Tall and the Short of It:
An Analysis of Children’s Ability to Acquire Gradable Adjectives
Saundra K. Wright
Department of English, CSU-Chico

Acquiring a language is an extraordinarily feat, and one of the major goals of linguistics is to develop a better understanding of the intricate cognitive skills necessary for developing our linguistic system. Linguists have spent years attempting to “unlock” this code of communication, trying to discover the complex set of rules that govern our language system. But amazingly—and even perplexingly—children master these rules almost effortlessly. My project focuses on one particular complexity of this language development—the acquisition of gradable adjective constructions in English.

Gradable adjectives, adjectives such as tall or long, are complex from both a linguistic and cognitive perspective. These adjectives are predicative expressions whose domains can be partially ordered according to some property that permits grading. The meaning associated with the interpretation of these adjectives can only be determined through comparison with some computed standard. For example, an adjective like tall has no clear-cut meaning; instead, it can only be interpreted through a comparison with some general notion of ‘tallness’. Gradability is a basic component of human cognition, and for adults, using gradable adjectives is a natural part of our ability to communicate. For children, however, developing this knowledge is by no means a trivial matter. To acquire the meaning of an adjective like tall, a child not only needs to gain information about the relevant dimension of ordering, but she/he also needs to acquire information about how the objects in question might be judged according to that dimension. Research in theoretical linguistics has addressed the complexity of these constructions from both a syntactic and semantic perspective but has yet to address how these constructions are acquired in the first place.

In this talk I attempt to provide insight into this issue. I will first start with a linguistic explanation of gradability, following the account of Kennedy (1999). I continue with a general explanation of the linguistic and cognitive stages that children likely go through when acquiring adjective meaning, using the relevant background to support those stages. I then conclude by presenting a variety of empirical investigations (still in the planning stages) that are designed to look more closely at how children begin to categorize objects, compute standards for comparison, and eventually acquire gradable adjective constructions. Research on these types of child language studies has important implications for child development from the perspective of early childhood education. Psychologists have long been interested in how children acquire abstract thought, how they begin to categorize objects, and how they begin to understand the nature of meaning; linguists have been interested in determining how children acquire the patterns and structures of language and how they begin to develop the rules that inform adult-like competency of a language. My research is unique in that it looks at neither language nor cognition as primary but instead seeks to find the middle ground where language and cognition simultaneously inform one another as children develop over time.