This paper constitutes a response to Lust and Mazuka's (1989) defense of the Principal Branching parameter and their critique of O'Grady, Suzuki-Wei, and Cho's (1986) experiment, which purported to show that even children learning left-branching languages exhibit a preference for forward patterns of anaphora. (Contains 16 references.) (JL)

Explores how children learn the range of aspect inflection to which a verb is amenable. Analyses focus on the children's mastery of Aktionsart specific intersentential patterns. Three conclusions are given based on the study's results. (21 references) (GLR)

The present research investigated whether children's referential choices for verb arguments are motivated by pragmatic features of discourse referents across different developmental stages, not only for children learning null argument languages but also for those learning overt argument languages. In Study 1, the form (null, pronominal, or…

Tests the prediction that children acquiring left-branching languages will exhibit a preference for backward patterns of anaphora by presenting data from Japanese and Korean which show the prediction to be false. Findings support the view that any directionality preference for anaphora is the same for all languages. (Author/SED)

Compares the prosodic modifications in mothers' and fathers' speech to preverbal infants in American and British English, French, German, Japanese, and Italian. Speech samples were instrumentally analyzed to measure mean fundamental frequency, variability, utterance, duration, and pause duration. (67 references) (Author/CB)

Comparison of maternal speech to three-month-olds between American (N=20) and Japanese (N=20) mother-infant dyads revealed that infant gaze affected the intended functions of maternal speech differently for the two groups. Cultural differences were also seen in the nature of function-form and function-referent relationships. (Author/CB)