This article reports on an individual differences study that investigated the role of implicit statistical learning in the acquisition of syntax in children. One hundred children ages 4 years 5 months through 6 years 11 months completed a test of implicit statistical learning, a test of explicit declarative learning, and standardized tests of…

Three experiments using 3- and 4-year-olds as subjects tested the hypothesis that focal colors are more salient than nonfocal colors for young children and are the areas to which color names initially become attached. (NH)

Investigated toddlers' acquisition and use of nonsense verbs in passive and active voice. Children used various strategies to answer questions designed to elicit voice changes but did not usually change verb construction. When passive and active constructions were primed, older children were able to use an active-introduced verb in passive…

Infants were tested for unimanual handedness at weekly intervals for a 14-week period beginning with the week of onset of duplicated syllable babbling. Group analyses indicating effects of sex and/or birth order on fluctuations and date review for individual infants suggested considerable variability across infants in occurrence and/or timing of…

Tested the fine-tuning hypothesis of language acquisition, which postulates that parents fine-tune their speech to their children's language level, by examining local patterns of interaction within the conversations of three parent-child dyads. The high positive correlations between parent-child dyads for the different interactional patterns…

Investigated whether the content of infant speech productions is better characterized as preserving stressed and final syllables or as preserving a trochaic pattern; used a detailed longitudinal description of one child's syllable omission. Found that the trochaic template hypothesis was not supported by these early productions. (Author/JPB)

Tests the universality hypothesis of language acquisition by asking young monolingual English and Japanese children to verify true affirmatives, false affirmatives, false negatives, and true negatives. The hypothesis was not supported in the case of Japanese-speaking children. A theory of cross-linguistic language acquisition is proposed.…

Longitudinal and cross-sectional studies of young English-, French-, and Korean-speaking children showed that, across the three languages, children go through three similar developmental stages before they acquire the adult system of answering negative questions. Several language-specific phenomena were observed. (BC)