Generic language ("Owls eat at night") expresses knowledge about categories and may represent a cognitively default mode of generalization. English-speaking children and adults more accurately recall generic than quantified sentences ("All owls eat at night") and tend to recall quantified sentences as generic. However, generics…

This study tested the predictions of the procedural deficit hypothesis by investigating the relationship between sequential statistical learning and two aspects of lexical ability, lexical-phonological and lexical-semantic, in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Participants included forty children (ages 8;5-12;3), twenty…

Two studies test the hypotheses that individual differences in phonological memory among children younger than two years can be assessed using a non-word repetition task (NWR) and that these differences are related to the children's rates of vocabulary development. NWR accuracy, real word repetition accuracy and productive vocabulary were assessed…

This paper examines the role of age, working memory span and phonological ability in the mastery of ten different grammatical constructions. Six- through eleven-year-old children (n = 68) and adults (n = 19) performed a grammaticality judgment task as well as tests of working memory capacity and receptive phonological ability. Children showed…

Three experiments with children between 5 and 7 years are described. It is shown that nominal predication of an unknown word by a superordinate term enables young children to make appropriate inferences concerning its attributes. The results are discussed in relation to semantic development and reasoning in the young child. (Author/RM)

Sentences written in either an expanded or optionally deleted form were read for imitation and delayed recall to a group of nursery school children and a group of adults. Results and their implications are discussed. (Author/RM)

Three groups of children, aged 5, 7, and 11 years, were tested in a clause-memory task, in order to investigate the role of syntactic and semantic factors in children's recall and processing of spoken continuous prose. (Author/SW)

Investigation of two- to four-year-olds' (N=20) understanding of temporal terms indicated that children were more likely to understand sentences using simple tasks, materials, and commands than more complicated sentences used in previous research. (Author/CB)

The speech children spontaneously quote was examined in 2 studies involving personal narratives from 96 children aged 4 to 9 and speech in 25 children aged 1 to 5. Findings showed that frequency of reported speech increased with age and direct quotation was more common than indirect or summarized quotations at all ages. (57 references) (Author/LB)

Investigated the relationship between children's failures to produce unambiguous utterances and the mental effort demands in children (ages five, six, seven, and nine years), using finger-tapping and message production tasks, separately and simultaneously. Findings suggest that the relative effort requirements of communication decrease with…