This study explored Mandarin-speaking mothers' referential choice in relation to informativeness. The data consisted of two Mandarin-speaking mothers' natural conversation with their children, collected when the children were between the ages of 2;2 and 3;1. The subject and object arguments of the mothers' utterances were coded for the categories…

Numerous studies conducted in both the psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic fields have established that the parents' socio-economic status (SES) influences several aspects of children's language production. Moreover, a number of psycholinguistic studies strongly suggest that these differences are due in part to differences in the nature and the…

The present project is a case study of 68 Kuwaiti children (aged between 4 and 8) who acted out their interpretation of verbal stimuli involving three word orders in Kuwaiti Arabic Subject Verb Object (SVO), Verb Subject Object (VSO) and Topic-Comment (T-C) by using a set of props. The purpose is to investigate the way Kuwaiti children comprehend…

Examines speech convergence as a primitive form of socialized speech. Discusses the extent of speech patter matching by three-year-old children and whether a talkative/reticence factor influenced degrees of convergence. (EKN)

Compares use of first person singular and second person singular references in Japanese and American children six years old and under. Hypothesizes that Japanese children use a greater variety of these forms and observe sex distinction in the use of these forms to a greater extent than American children. (Author/AM)

Reports on a study which explored the intonational differences between constant plus variable utterances and variable plus variable utterances, and which sought to use intonation to resolve the lexical additive vs syntactic representation of beginning productions. (AM)

Three- to nine-year-olds' (N=80) post-exposure production of regular and irregular suffixes indicated that subjects found it easier to learn a regular suffix when they heard it used with phonetically similar base forms. Subjects were more likely to overgeneralize the regular suffix to irregular forms when they had heard it used in conjunction with…

Longitudinal studies of the application of a paraphrasing model to 18- to 28-month-olds indicated that mean length of utterance was significantly correlated with realized and paraphrased frequencies of several linguistic items in the subjects' corpora. The model was productive for examining children's corpora of speech and the linguistic…

Discusses the strategies that a child might employ during the one-word stage in constructing an early lexicon. An attempt is made to shed light on some strategies by analyzing the lexical and phonological development of two children who seem to take opposite approaches. (Author/JL)

Adult Kuwaitis were interviewed to ascertain whether or not they modified their speech when talking to young children. Those who indicated they did not were recorded while they were interacting with a young child. Results show that all modified their speech in accordance with the standard descriptions of motherese. (Author/VWL)

Examines the relationship between the development of fine motor control for articulation and the development of fine motor control in other muscle systems. Discusses whether the late appearance of /r/ and /1/ is due to the fact that their articulation requires finer motor coordination than other classes of sounds. (EKN)

Investigates the functional nature of the communication process observed in interactions of English-speaking and Japanese-speaking children from the two-word stage onward, with special attention to the given/new contract and pragmatic factors. (Author/AM)

Reports on studies examining the extent to which mothers tailor their speech to a child's level of linguistic ability. Methodological implications for language acquisition research are discussed. (AM)

A longitudinal study of four 17- to 33-month-olds revealed that their linguistic selection at the one-word stage was governed by principles of informativeness, while the two-word stage was characterized by new, or a combination of new and old, information. (Author/CB)

Luo-speaking children in Kenya responded to a test using nonce forms in morphophonology. Morphophonological processes in the acquisition of Luo plurals and possessives presented different degrees of difficulty for the subjects, with the type of morphophonological alteration in a language likely to affect the rate and order of acquisition.…