This study investigates the emergence and development of the discourse-pragmatic functions of the Japanese subject markers "wa" and "ga" from a usage-based perspective (Tomasello, 2000). The use of each marker in longitudinal speech data for four Japanese children from 1;0 to 3;1 and their parents available in the CHILDES…

What are the sources of variation in the input, and how much do they matter for language acquisition? This study examines frequency variation in manner-of-articulation classes in child and adult input. The null hypothesis is that segmental frequency distributions of language varieties are unigram (modelable by stationary, ergodic processes), and…

Repetition is used for a range of functions in conversation. In this study, we examined all the repetitions used in spontaneous conversations by 41 French adult-child dyads, with children aged 2 ; 3 and 3 ; 6, to test the hypotheses that adults repeat to establish that they have understood, and that children repeat to ratify what adults have said.…

The acquisition of reference involves both morphosyntax and pragmatics. This study investigates whether Dutch, English and French two- to three-year-old children differentiate in their use of determiners between non-specific/specific reference, newness/givenness in discourse and mutual/no mutual knowledge between interlocutors. A brief analysis of…

Analysis of a database of tag questions in children's speech shed light on their structure and function. (JB)

The focus of this paper is the acquisition of the verb "eat." The transcripts of 40 children who were audiotaped monthly from 1;0 to 3;0, showed that "eat" was the first member of this verb class to be acquired. (16 references) (JL)

Describe studies in which day-long recordings were made of nine-year-old children's spontaneous speech. Results indicate that: (1) children aged five to 15 speak some 20,000 words of discourse per day in about two to three hours of pure speaking time; (2) they have an active vocabulary of some 3,000 word-form types. (SED)

Examines narrative telling by children, and the transition in development from the capability of talking in the "here and now" to the capability of telling about the "there and then." Seemingly, very young children can produce narratives in an unscaffolded context to adults unfamiliar with these experiences. (23 references) (GLR)

Describes a study that analyzes the naturalistic productions of "because" and "so" by 96 children, aged three-and-a-half to nine-and-a-half years of age, while narrating personal events. Analyzes results in terms of such factors as: correctness, types of causality, nature of actor/recipient, time of causality, producer, and linguistic issues. (SED)

Findings include (1) comprehension of 'this,''that,''here,' and 'there' depends on the role the comprehender plays in the conversation and (2) 'this' and 'here' are more difficult to comprehend that 'that' and 'there.' (EKN)

Describes a study that examines the effect of an adult-child discourse structure on the word combination produced by 17 children at the single-word utterance level. There was a significant difference between pretest and posttest multiword production for the experimental group of six children, but no difference for the control group. (SED)

Three experiments gauging 7- to 10-year-old children's ability to interpret and comprehend figurative language indicated that informative contexts could improve subjects' abilities to perceive idiomatic meanings. Subjects were less able to produce idioms than to comprehend them, but were able to perceive that language can be both figurative and…

Word learning by young children is viewed as a problem deriving from the use of forms of discourse texts. Uses of causal and temporal terms in private speech by a child studied longitudinally from 1;9 to 3;0 are analyzed from this perspective. (Contains 38 references.) (JL)

How a child answers questions provides information about how he or she processes input. A child's early responses to questions at age one year, three months, were compared to her responses at one year, seven months, when she was in the two-word stage. (SW)

Examines a corpus of narratives produced by preschool children, and focuses on differences among the three age groups with respect to: (1) complexity, (2) the relationship between story elements and the discursive context, (3) relationship between story elements and extralinguistic context, and (4) shaping of the narrative as story and as part of…