The relationship between children's concepts of life and their judgments and revisions of sentences with violations of animacy restrictions was examined. (Author/MP)

Investigated the ability of six children at ages 24, 26, 28, 30, 33, and 36 months to understand the topic of talk not addressed to them. Analyzed children's intrusions into conversations between their mothers and older siblings. Results indicated that intrusions formed a considerable proportion of children's talk. (RJC)

Examines the abilities of 50 children (10 each at ages 6, 8, 10, 12, and 14 years) to produce tag questions. Of particular interest was the determination of whether or not constituents of a correct tag are acquired at different ages. (MP)

Subjects between 8 and 20 years of age were tested for competence on an exception to a grammatical rule, the minimal distance rule. (Authors)

Analysis indicates that both 5 and 7-year-old children are capable of distinguishing between anomalous and meaningful sentences although 7-year-olds demonstrate greater awareness of selection restriction rules. (Authors)

Five studies examined preschoolers' understanding of linguistic form class and pragmatic context in presence of a single exemplar or multiexemplars. Data indicated that by 2 years, children use linguistic form class, and by age 3, use pragmatic context. Young children have begun to understand the distinction between generic and nongeneric noun…

Reports three experiments which examined preschool, first-grade, and third-grade children's understanding of metaphorical language. Subjects acted out short stories which ended in metaphorical sentences by using toys. Predictability of the story endings and the complexity of the metaphorical sentences are found to affect metaphor comprehension.…

Examines developmental patterns in the solution of verbal analogies. Twenty subjects in each of grades 3, 6, 9, and in college were tested on their relative abilities to solve 180 verbal analogies based on five different verbal relations. (CM)