Research results indicated that children were able to use information from a number of sources in interpreting commands in which the relational terms were replaced by nonsense. Linguistic and nonlinguistic context and prior repetition presented constraints to children's responses. (Author/JB)

Cross-linguistic investigation of the importance of syntactic cues and cue processing cost in French and Spanish four through six-year-olds' sentence comprehension revealed that topological cues helped French subjects most, while local cues helped Spanish subjects most. (Author/CB)

Two investigations of preschool children's relative dependence upon contextual and linguistic information to discriminate between speech acts revealed that younger subjects' discrimination of each speech act appeared relatively unaffected by reduction of linguistic information, while older subjects' performance was adversely affected. (Author/CB)

The linguistic form of a nonliteral expression, and the context in which it occurs, can greatly influence young children's succcess or failure in assigning a meaning to a figurative expression. Experiments have shown that the same metaphorical expression can be easier to understand when expressed in a linguistic form that is familiar to young…

A study investigated the hypothesis that, for adult native speakers of English, increasing syntactic complexity would lead to increased salience of phonological properties of words. The study also examined whether syntactic simplicity would lead to a greater salience of semantic properties of words. Subjects were required to name a word presented…

Presents background to the descriptions and discussions of child language that are presented in this issue of the journal on the theme of developing pragmatic competence. This background information, referred to as "intuitive knowledge," serves as a framework for understanding children's development of pragmatic linguistic competence and…

Comparison of language-impaired two- to three-year-olds (N=10) and normal one-year-olds (N=15) matched for expressive language revealed that the language-impaired subjects acquired a greater number of object concepts presented in a no-action condition than the normal children, although language-impaired subjects' extensions of the names to new…

The process of acquiring word meaning from context was investigated for high- and low-ability fifth-grade children. Findings demonstrated characteristics of processing that differentiate successful and less successful acquisition and underscore the complexity of the meaning-acquisition process. (HOD)

Children and adults participated in a series of experiments to examine certain cues to surface constituency that are salient to children in the recognition of syntactic structure. Cue recognition was studied through a set of experiments requiring seven-year-old children to repeat certain syntactic constituents. It was found that the children could…

The comprehension processing strategies of 15 monolingual English and 8 bilingual French native speakers were compared with those of 112 second-language learners of French, using stimuli containing word order and clitic pronoun cues in French. Results indicated differential dependence on cue use by native speakers. (Contains 97 references.)…

A study examined acquisition of new vocabulary through oral stories in first-, third-, and fifth-grade children. Each subject heard four stories, each including four nonsense words repeated three times. These novel words represented common nouns whose meanings could be derived from propositional information associated with their occurrence. The…

A longitudinal study was conducted using 18 mildly/moderately retarded 14- and 15-year-olds to investigate word knowledge acquisition and subcategorization features of the words. Retarded children's errors were highly correlated with word frequency. Two interpretations (gradual acquisition of word knowledge and a reorganization theory) are…

A study is undertaken to determine whether the nonlinguistic priority of the agent of an action facilitates the comprehension of word reference. The subjects were twelve male and twelve female infants at the one word stage of language production. The children were presented with three nonsense names (presented as part of a narration of a filmed…