The present study investigates flexibility of verb use in the early stages of English multiword development, and its relationship with patterns attested in the input. The data is taken from a case study of a monolingual English-speaking boy aged 2; 5-2; 9 and his mother while engaged in daily activities in the home. Data were coded according to…

Analyzes mothers' speech in free-play interactions with their 12- to 27-month-old children for frequency and type of fantasy relationships. Results indicate that the older the child, the more fantasy talk a mother is likely to use. (EKN)

A study of two- to six-year-olds' spontaneous uses of "from" to mark oblique agents showed that, while the two-year-olds produced "from" for agents and "with" for instruments in imitation, older subjects shifted to "by" for agents and kept "from" to mark locative sources. (Author/CB)

Analysis of the use of the connective "but" by 3- to 9-year-olds indicated that all most commonly used the word to signal semantic relationships and for pragmatic functions. Younger children most frequently used "but" when causal or precausal relationships existed, and older children used "but" more to encode complex contrast. (Author/CB)

Examined how Italian day-care teachers (N=5) spoke to young children and adjusted their language according to age and size of groups. It was found that teachers made both structural and functional modifications of language according to childrens' ages and the size of groups, with group size exerting a greater influence on the features of the…

Investigation of four- through six-year-olds' abilities to correct over-regularized plural nouns and verbs in the past tense showed that, generally, older children performed better than the younger children, and plural nouns were corrected significantly more than past-tense verb forms. Younger children were better at correcting the nouns than the…

Discusses nominal-pronominal reduplication (NPR) in the language of children ages seven and nine in four situations. Younger children produced more NPR; all children produced little NPR talking to their peers and increasing amounts talking to adults. Examples are given and analyzed. (EJS)

Analysis of the free speech of one- to three-year-olds (N=21) found that measures of mean length of utterance (MLU) are positively related to age, are reliable, and can predict grammatical development, although there are identifiable points in the developmental evolution of MLU and MLU-like indices beyond which their reliability and validity have…

Examines the changes that occur from ages 5 to 11 in question/answer sequences of Dutch children. Function, content, form of questions, and listener response are analyzed. (EKN)