In his comment, A. Roelofs claimed that a feedforward-only theory of spoken word production (WEAVER++) can account for certain basic facts of spoken word production that B. Rapp and M. Goldrick (2000) argued could not be accounted for by feedforward-only theories. Rapp and Goldrick argued that to account for these facts, mechanisms such as…

This article is based on the analysis of a fragment of conversation recorded in a year one classroom. It explores the ways in which young children use language to produce a meaningful world and highlights the importance of language in the presentation of social experience. It then draws upon this analysis to discuss how children learn to use…

An examination of the use of metaphors by children summarizes the views of metaphor as found in the literature and describes a theoretical framework for the study of such utterances in young children by integrating two hypotheses. It is postulated that the young child uses metaphor to test new inferences about various kinds of relationships in the…

This book provides a summary of past and cutting-edge research on the acquisition of language by young children. It lends support to the behavioralist paradigm of language acquisition, namely, that maternal rewards and corrections should be integrated with perceptual, cognitive, and social learning conceptualizations in a skill-learning approach…