Language exerts a powerful influence on our concepts. We review evidence documenting the developmental origins of a precocious link between language and object categories in very young infants. This collection of studies documents a cascading process in which early links between language and cognition provide the foundation for later, more precise…

Argues against Youssef's treatise which pointed out some difficulties in attempting to test Bickerton's language bioprogram hypothesis (LBH), contending that the treatise seriously misunderstood certain key concepts of the LBH and dismissed with questionable reasoning some important findings which supported the state/process distinction as a…

Describes the CHILDES/BIB electronic bibliographic database, its contents, and its relationship to the CHILDES database. CHILDES is a depository of child language corpora and is the publisher of CHAT (a transcription manual) and CLAN (an electronic package for child language research). (GLR)

Presents four principles for archive-based language research: maximum readability and minimum bias; consistent encoding for exhaustive computer search; systematic contrastiveness; and data comparability in elicitation, transcription and coding. Examples from existing computer archives illustrate these and other principles, and strategies are…

Presents a study of young children's understanding that pronouns and proper names cannot be modified by pronominal adjectives. Some nonsyntactic theories are discussed that support the claim that children understand knowledge of word order through the rules that order abstract linguistic categories. (31 references) (GLR)

Demonstrates the important need for language researchers to fill in the considerable theory data gap regarding the primary acquisition of Spanish by pointing out that theory development could be distorted if cross-linguistic comparisons of acquisition evidence draw on a faulty, incomplete data base. (CB)

Provides critical analysis of Edwards (1992) presentation of a set of examples from the Child Language Data Exchange System as prototypes of bad transcription practice. The analysis argues that Edward's approach causes the development of an overly rigid set of principles that could stop progress in the analysis of spontaneous language samples.…

Examines the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES), its organizational form, and its three major tools: (1) the CHILDES database of transcripts, (2) the CHAT system for transcribing and coding data, and (3) the CLAN programs for analyzing CHAT files. (GLR)

Provides an experimental validation of Landau and Gleitman's (1985) syntactic bootstrapping procedure on how children may use syntactic information to learn new verbs. The children's choice of the correct referent for a given verb versus a nonsense verb in two syntactic structures is explained. (37 references) (GLR)

Examines narrative telling by children, and the transition in development from the capability of talking in the "here and now" to the capability of telling about the "there and then." Seemingly, very young children can produce narratives in an unscaffolded context to adults unfamiliar with these experiences. (23 references) (GLR)

Argues that current attempts to show that forward directionality effects can also be induced in Japanese acquisition do not succeed in supporting the forward directionality preference of anaphora. (57 references) (Author/CB)

Argues that the measures of content and style of maternal talk used by the Murray and Trevarthen (1986) study of temporal patterning during vocal engagements did not directly indicate the ways in which the behaviors of the partners (mothers and infants) were combined on a moment-to-moment basis. (Author/CB)

Suggests that Goad & Ingram's (1987) argument in favor of a cognitive model of phonological development failed to recognize the uniqueness of each individual's neural and vocal structures, ignored documented variability in the phonetic patterns of prelexical infants, and inexplicably assumed that inter-child variability implied the operation of…

Type/Token Ratios (TTRs) frequently fail to discriminate between children at widely different stages of language development, and may fall as children get older. Such effects are caused by a negative, though non-linear, relationship between sample size and TTR. Standardization of the number of tokens before computing TTRs is recommended.…