The work reported here experimentally investigates a striking generalization about vocabulary acquisition: Noun learning is superior to verb learning in the earliest moments of child language development. The dominant explanation of this phenomenon in the literature invokes differing conceptual requirements for items in these lexical categories: Verbs are cognitively more complex than nouns and so their acquisition must await certain mental developments in the infant. In the present work, we investigate an alternative hypothesis; namely, that it is the information requirements of verb learning, not the conceptual requirements, that crucially determine the acquisition order. Efficient verb learning requires access to structural features of the exposure language and thus cannot take place until a scaffolding of noun knowledge enables the acquisition of clause-level syntax. More generally, we experimentally investigate the hypothesis that vocabulary acquisition takes place via an incremental constraint-satisfaction procedure that bootstraps itself into successively more sophisticated linguistic representations which, in turn, enable new kinds of vocabulary learning. If the experimental subjects were young children, it would be difficult to distinguish between this information-centered hypothesis and the conceptual change hypothesis. Therefore the experimental "learners" are adults. The items to be "acquired" in the experiments were the 24 most frequent nouns and 24 most frequent verbs from a sample of maternal speech to 18-24-month-old infants. The various experiments ask about the kinds of information that will support identification of these words as they occur in mother-to-child discourse. Both the proportion correctly identified and the type of word that is identifiable changes significantly as a function of information type. We discuss these results as consistent with the incremental construction of a highly lexicalized grammar by cognitively and pragmatically sophisticated human infants, but inconsistent with a procedure in which lexical acquisition is independent of and antecedent to syntax acquisition.

WMHI volume is associated with structural and functional brain changes even within a group of very healthy individuals. WMHI is associated with poorer frontal lobe cognitive function and, when severe, is accompanied by significantly reduced frontal lobe metabolism. Subjects with large WMHI volumes have significantly higher systolic blood pressure, brain atrophy, reduced cerebral metabolism, and lower scores on tests of frontal lobe function than age-matched controls. Large amounts of WMHI are, therefore, pathologic and may be related to elevated systolic blood pressure even when it is within the normal age-related range.

The course of decline was studied in 16 patients with probable or definite dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) over 2.7 to 6.8 years from first to last evaluation. Overall severity of dementia was measured with the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS), the Dementia Rating Scale (DRS), and the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), at approximately annual intervals. An initial plateau phase, during which language and cognitive functions did not change for periods of 9 to 35 months, was observed in 5 patients who initially had an isolated memory impairment without significant impairment of nonmemory language or visuospatial function. Once nonmemory functions began to decline, the rate of decline was remarkably steady in most individual patients but varied markedly among patients. The initial rate of decline after the plateau phase, as measured with the WAIS and DRS, was a significant predictor of subsequent rate in individual patients (r = .66, p less than .01, and r = .67, p less than .01, for the WAIS and DRS, respectively). The MMSE was a less reliable measure of longitudinal change in dementia severity and did not predict future rates of decline (r = .29). These results demonstrate a biphasic trajectory of decline in patients with DAT. Stable interindividual differences in rate of decline may provide a basis for designing more sensitive studies of treatments intended to slow or halt the progress of DAT.

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