This dissertation presents a series of studies examining the structure and meaning of compounds, such as mouse-trap and mouse-catcher, in child and adult grammars. The first part of this dissertation examines how adults interpret compounds and the second part examines how children acquire the adult compounding system. The goals are (i) to argue that a generative lexical semantics is necessary to understand how speakers use compounds and (ii) to argue that children use the same generative mechanism as adults to build compound interpretations.In the first part of this dissertation two adult studies examine the role of a generative syntax and a generative lexical semantics (Pustejovsky 1995) in the interpretation of compounds. The first study asks adults to interpret novel noun-noun compounds and verbal compounds. The results support the hypothesis that organized lexical information, including natural classes, must be taken into account in addition to syntactic structure to determine the most likely meaning of compounds. The second study asks adults to rate different interpretations of verbal compounds. The results support the hypothesis that the syntax of verbal compounds constrains the relationship between the verb and modifier to a single verb-internal argument interpretation. Taken together, these results support a model where both the syntax and the lexical semantics are active, generative mechanisms.In the second part of this dissertation five child studies test the hypothesis that, given compositionality, children's knowledge of syntax and lexical semantics go hand in hand with their interpretation. Three studies examine children's production and interpretation of noun-noun compounds, with the goal of determining if children use lexical structure in the same way as adults when producing and interpreting compounds. The first noun-noun study is a corpus study. The results support the hypothesis that children and adults produce novel noun-noun compounds according to the natural classes of the constituents in compounds, but not the individual words in compounds. The second noun-noun compound study is an elicited production task. The results provide evidence for children's production of compounds for the same range of meanings as adults, albeit to a lesser degree overall. Finally, the third noun-noun compound study is a forced-choice interpretation task. The results support the hypothesis that children interpret novel compounds according to their knowledge of natural class behavior, rather than individual word behavior. Next, two studies examine children's production and interpretation of verbal compounds. The goal of these studies is to examine whether children's knowledge of verbal compound syntax, as evidenced by their production, makes predictions about children's comprehension of verbal compounds. The first study is an elicited production task. The results provide evidence for the idea that children's non-adult verbal compound forms (catch-mouse and catcher-mouse but not mouse-catch for mouse-catcher) reflect the steps in the adult derivation of verbal compounds. The second study is a forced-choice interpretation task. From the results we observe that children constrain their interpretation of verbal compounds based on their knowledge of the verbal compound structure.In summary, the results of the child studies provide evidence that children use the same system as adults to interpret compounds, and any deviations from adult-like interpretations can be explained by non-adult syntactic or lexical semantic knowledge.
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