Studies examining productive syntax have used varying elicitation methods and have tended to focus on either young children or adolescents/adults, so we lack an account of syntactic development throughout middle childhood. We describe here the results of an analysis of clause complexity in narratives produced by 354 speakers aged from four years…

Language in autism has been the subject of intense interest, because communication deficits are central to the disorder, and because autism serves as an arena for testing theories of language acquisition. High-functioning older children with autism are often considered to have intact grammatical abilities, despite pragmatic impairments. Given the…

Two experiments are described which explore the relationship between parental reports of infants' receptive vocabularies at 1 ; 6 () or 1 ; 3, 1 ; 6 and 1 ; 9 () and the comprehension infants demonstrated in a preferential looking task. The instrument used was the Oxford CDI, a British English adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates CDI (Words &…

Two experiments showed that: 5- and 6-year-old listeners have difficulties with spatial reference if it includes "left" and "right"; and 7-year-olds understand this limitation on the comprehension skill of younger children and make appropriate allowances by using more landmarks instead. (CB)

This paper explores "fast mapping", one of several processes that have been proposed to be involved in the rapid vocabulary expansion observed in the preschool years. An adaptation of a receptive word matching task examined how well children retained a just-mapped relation between word and referent when some information was later missing.…