Assesses whether 30 children aged three-five years had a preferred direction in responding to "when"-questions and whether this preference could be influenced by story structure. Results indicated that children showed a preference for "after"-type responses and that productions of "before" were more likely to be…

Five- through 9-year olds and adults heard ironic and literal criticisms and literal compliments. Found that comprehension of irony emerged between 5 and 6 years; and ratings of humor in irony increased with age but ratings of meanness in irony did not. (BC)

Examined two-year-olds' word learning. In one study, adults modeled the new word for an object novel to the children; in another, the object was novel only for the adult. Subjects displayed significant learning of new words in both settings, suggesting that toddlers understand that novelty in a discourse setting is determined from the speaker's…

Results from these two studies show that fast mapping--gaining information about a word from how it is used in a sentence, what words it is contrasted with, and other factors--can be used successfully by children two to four years old to form quick and rough hypotheses about the meaning of a word. (PCB)

When preschool children think of objects as organized into collections (e.g., forest, army) they solve certain problems better than when they think of the same objects as organized into classes (e.g., trees, soldiers). Present studies indicate preschool children occasionally distort natural language inclusion hierarchies (e.g., oak, tree) into the…

Three experiments tested four- to seven-year olds' ability to understand and reconcile message-desire discrepant stories. The findings suggest that young children can refrain from a performative response and, as a consequence, attend to literal meaning under some conditions when evaluating utterances. (MDM)

Critiques previous research concerning differences in voice onset time discrimination between Spanish and English infants and conclusions about the effect of early linguistic experience on speech perception. (RMH)

Argues that Aslin and Pisoni's criticisms are basically unwarranted on both methodological and conceptual grounds. (RMH)

Investigates whether patient animacy affected the acquisition of the passive construction of syntax of 32 children aged two-five years. Results indicate that children who were taught the passive with animate patients produced more passives in the teaching phase than did comparable children who received inanimate patients. (RJC)

Three studies investigated how 3-year-old Japanese children interpret the meaning of a new word associated with a familiar artifact. Findings suggest that children flexibly recruit clues from multiple sources, including shape information and function familiarity, but the clues are weighed in hierarchical order so children can determine the single…

Examined the effect of linguistic contrast in children's learning of color names. A novel color term for a stimulus color that was contrasted with a child's label helped five-year olds learn the new term. When the contrast was presented more than once, three- and four-year olds performed much like the five-year olds. (BC)

Three experiments investigated whether preschoolers attend to actions or object when learning a novel verb. Findings showed that children learning nouns in the context of novel, moving objects attended exclusively to appearances of objects. Children learning verbs attended equally to appearances and motions. With familiar objects, children…

Investigated in preschoolers whether the bilingual advantage in cognitive control or selective attention could be found in a nonverbal task, the dimensional change card sort, requiring minimal demands for analysis or representation. Found that bilingual children were more advanced than monolinguals in solving problems requiring high levels of…

Investigated the influence of Ukrainian-English bilingualism on first and third grade children's awareness of the arbitrary nature of word-referent relationships and on their ability to analyze linguistic input. (JMB)

Studied bilingual children and children learning a second language using a picture-word interference task. The printed distractors interfered with naming both on trials where the distractor and naming language were the same and on trials where they were different. These and other results question whether an "input switch" operates for bilingual…