ABSTRACT
Many people — especially those working with artificial intelligence models of language processes — have been struck by the complexity of the knowledge base necessary to understand even simple language and by the ease with which very young children appear to use this knowledge base in their everyday lives. Impressively, young children's language use appears to involve inference, prediction, and long-term memory for sequentially ordered events — cognitive skills that are usually considered underdeveloped even when the child enters school. The problem is how to characterize children's knowledge in a way that can account both for their great success in using language in their everyday lives and their great difficulty in performing many other cognitive tasks. To do this we must look to the natural language system that the child uses in his own ecology. As one means toward that end, we have been scanning baby biographies and parental diaries.
