Purpose: Place and manner of articulation in American English-learning children's salient consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (C[subscript 1]VC[subscript 2]V) target words (e.g., "baby," "bunny," and "cookie") were compared with their actual productions of these words. We hypothesized that target words with repeated place…

If a child asks a friend to play football and the friend replies, 'I have a cough', the requesting child must make a 'relevance inference' to determine the communicative intent. Relevance inferencing is a key component of pragmatics, that is, the ability to integrate social context into language interpretation and use. We tested which cognitive…

Relatively late mastery of scalar implicatures has been suggested to correlate with children's immature processing capacities, such as their limited working memory. Yet, many studies that tested for a link between children's working memory and their computation of scalar implicatures have failed to find any correlation. One possible reason is that…

It has long been known that children may use a particular grammatical morpheme inconsistently at early stages of acquisition. Although this has often been thought to be evidence of incomplete syntactic representations, there is now a large body of crosslinguistic evidence showing that much of this early within-speaker variability is due to still…

This paper, based on naturalistic data, describes the acquisitional course and use of the articles "a" and "the" in young English-speaking children (18-61 months), with special emphasis on the role of individual variation. A growth modeling approach to the data reveals that children's individual acquisition schedules are similar in trend, but vary…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether individual differences observed in the grammatical morphology of children with specific language impairment (SLI) could be traced to another source, such as the use of weak syllables. Results show that imitations in prosody may restrict the degree of grammatical morpheme use by children with SLI.…

This study focuses on the semantic development of individual lexical items, as viewed from a semantic features perspective. It involves four narrow semantic domains, a sample of elementary school-children and their teachers, and two native language groups, English and Spanish. Semantic development is studied through the process of equivalence…