Single-Word Usage, Cognitive Development, and the Beginnings of Combinatorial Speech

Previous investigators have believed that there is a 'holophrastic period' during the normal course of language acquisition, i.e. a period in which a child uses a single-word utterance to express something similar to the meaning which adults convey through the use of a relation, such as Fillmore's case relations, which involve more than one word. Some investigators have even attributed to the holophrase the meaning conveyed by an entire adult sentence. Previous studies have also provided ev...