To examine whether children's acquisition of perspective-marking language supports development in their ability to reason about mental states, we conducted a longitudinal study testing whether proficiency with complement clauses around age 3 explained variance in false-belief reasoning 6 months later. Forty-five English-speaking 2- and 3-year-olds…

We assessed the language, cognitive, and socioemotional abilities of 27 internationally adopted children from China, adopted by French-speaking parents, 12 of whom had been assessed previously by Gauthier and Genesee. The children were on average 7 years, 10 months old and were matched to nonadopted monolingual French-speaking children on age,…

Using an elicited imitation paradigm, we investigated whether young children imitate the communicative intentions behind speech. Previous research using elicited imitation has shown that children tend to correct ungrammatical sentences. This finding is usually interpreted as evidence that children, like adults, remember and reproduce the gist of…

An analysis of sentence grammar is made to show that the ability to produce coherent texts emerges slowly and late in linguistic and cognitive development. (HP)

The development of sentence coordination in children using sentences conjoined by "and" was studied to test the adequacy of the transformationally based derivational theory of complexity. Two cross-sectional experiments were conducted using 18 sentence types with children between the ages of three and five. One experiment used an elicited…

This article clarifies the position taken in the Greenfield and Smith book (1976), including relation to speech act theory, and elucidates some general theoretical issues in early language development. (Author/NCR)

This follow-up study compares cognitive and language aspects of a group of Italian children ages 4-6 years, who had shown delayed expressive language abilities at 24 months of age (late talkers), with those of a group of children with a history of normal expressive language development (average talkers). Children were given a battery of…

Phenomena are examined to support the conception that cognitive structures continue to reflect the numerous ways of apprehending the world that blend to some degree into each other. (AMH)

Comprehension of reversible active and passive sentences was studied with 48 Japanese children between the ages of two and six. Four types of sentences were constructed using passive and active structures and two word orders: subject-object-verb (SOV) and object-subject-verb (OSV). The basic order of elements in a simple sentence in Japanese is…

THREE GROUPS OF FIRST- AND SECOND-GRADE CHILDREN, TWO LOWER-CLASS AND ONE MIDDLE-CLASS, WERE ASKED TO LEARN AND RECALL SEQUENCES OF WORDS AT FOUR LEVELS OF CONCEPTUAL DIFFICULTY--NONSENSE SYLLABLES, HIGH FREQUENCY NOUNS, ANOMALOUS SENTENCES, AND MEANINGFUL SENTENCES. IT WAS HYPOTHESIZED THAT THE STUDENTS' VERBAL MEMORY WOULD INCREASE WITH…

Most Russian courses suffer from an inadequate approach to the presentation of syntax even though continued emphasis on syntax from the beginning would help to remove the trial and error syndrome inherent in purely audiolingual methods and would channel the student's efforts to internalize and make automatic his answers in a relevant context, thus…

This paper proposes a broad outline of a variable model of language development and explores several particulars of such a model in the language behavior of four two-year-old children. The process by which information about language is progressively transformed and integrated rather than merely being added together can be seen in the shifting…