Patterns of acquisition in the emerging mental lexicon: the case of to and for in English.

A corpus analysis of 32 English-speaking children's first usages of the prepositions to and for (which have similar properties semantically and grammatically) was undertaken for the purpose of tracking intralexemic sense acquisition and lexical organization in an often neglected word class. The earliest senses used by these children do not reflect historical patterns of semantic extension. Diachronically, concrete, spatial, and semantically transparent usages emerged before more abstract, nonspatial, and opaque usages. Developmentally, frequency of use in the child's linguistic environment and co-occurrence in collocations with favored verbs or other useful expressions proved to be the major determinant of early production, suggesting that external rather than internal/cognitive factors play the major role in lexical development.