When linguistic information alone does not clarify a speaker's intended meaning, skilled communicators can draw on a variety of cues to infer communicative intent. In this paper, we review research examining the developmental emergence of preschoolers' sensitivity to a communicative partner's perspective. We focus particularly on preschoolers'…

For socially appropriate communication, speakers must command a variety of linguistic styles, or "registers", that vary according to social context and social relationships. This study examined preschool children's ability to use a speaker's register choice to infer the identity of their addressee. Four-year-olds could draw correct inferences…

Assesses the interrelations among the functional properties of maternal speech, the structural properties of maternal speech, and child language growth for a period of six months for 22 two-year-old children and their mothers. (HOD)

A study investigated the extent to which the nature of verb input accounts for the order in which children acquire verbs. Subjects were 57 mothers and their Stage I children. Results suggest that the effect of syntactic diversity in input supports the "syntactic bootstrapping" account of how children use structural information to learn new verbs'…

Papers on a variety of linguistic topics include six papers from a Festschrift and nine others, as follows: "Attitudes Towards English as a Possible Lingua Franca in Switzerland" (Urs Durmuller); "Functional Stability and Structural Levelling of Dialects: The Case of Maastricht" (Anton M. Hagen, Henk Munstermann); "On the…

Discusses the centers of language in the brain and the critical period for language acquisition. Explains developmental milestones of language development--receptive language, babbling, short phrases, full sentences--in the context of brain development. Emphasizes parents' role in language development, including talking to the child, dialogic…