How a child answers questions provides information about how he or she processes input. A child's early responses to questions at age one year, three months, were compared to her responses at one year, seven months, when she was in the two-word stage. (SW)

Twelve one-word-stage children were given minimally contrasting two-word instructions. Since non-linguistic cues were eliminated, comprehension involved making non-syntactic inferences from the word combinations. The children could respond correctly to some of the instructions, and even carried out some unfamiliar activities. (Author/SW)

In a study, Tagalog-speaking children, 3-, 5-, and 7-year olds, demonstrated better mastery of patient-focus (passive) than agent-focus (active) sentence structure. These results were attributed to the children's strategy of interpreting the first noun of a sentence to be the agent of the action. (SW)

Evidence is provided to refute the suggestion, made by Macnamara et al. (1976), that four-year-old children perform logical operations corresponding to formal logic upon the sentential components of implicative verbs to produce indirect implications. It is argued that children use past knowledge plus additional premises to derive indirect…

Presents a rebuttal to Hidi and Hildyard's (1976) criticism of Macnamara et al.'s (1976) assertion regarding the ability of four-year-old children to grasp implicatives and presuppositions. (AM)

Reports on a study designed to: (1) produce a multiple-choice test which would measure children's comprehension of figurative language, and (2) obtain information about the development of figurative language comprehension in children. (Author/AM)