Two experiments investigated 4-year-olds' use of descriptive sentences to learn non-obvious properties of unfamiliar kinds. Novel creatures were described using generic or nongeneric sentences (e.g., "These are pagons. Pagons/These pagons are friendly"). Children's willingness to extend the described property to a new category member was then…

McCormack and Hoerl's state of the art review of the development of temporal concepts from the end of infancy to the end of the fifth year shows that young children's conception of time is quite different from that of adults. Adults and 5-year-old children can construe an event from a range of temporal perspectives and can describe it from a…

Discusses relevance of language acquisition and use to educational practice and the student's school performance. (GB)

Results of two experiments support these hypotheses: 1) children tend to treat contradictions and tautologies as empirical statements, due to their nonempirical character, not merely to the logical words occurring in them; and 2) the ability to examine language objectively is necessary for the ability to correctly evaluate nonempirical statements.…

A study is reported which examined the acquisition of deictic verbs by asking children to identify the speaker or the addressee of utterances containing "come,""go,""bring," and "take." Analysis showed that children go through several stages in the acquisition of deictic verbs. (Author/RM)

Examines the effects of chronological age, mental age, and intelligence quotient on verbal imitation of five-year-old children, concluding that transition occurs during the fifth year of life as young five-year-olds emitted more mimical and less conceptual responses than older five-year-olds. (RB)

This article discusses an attempt to establish a model of the cognitive strategies used by a child in the acquisition of nouns and the stages in the process of categorizing reality. (Text is in Italian.) (CFM)

Reports on an experiment, performed on seven children, designed to show that children understand "here" and "there" with the self as reference point before they understand words such as these with reference to other speakers as reference points. (Author/AM)

Discusses the concept of metalinguistic awareness and describes the administration of the Test of Metalinguistic Ability (TAM) to 300 Italian elementary school children. (34 references) (CFM)

Suggests that even the youngest children use systematic strategies in ordering the elements of a story based on causal and temporal relationships. (FL)

Do infants and young children possess implicit theory of mind that is revealed through their communicative interactions, or are they simply treating their interlocutors as objects to manipulate in service to their own material ends? Paper reviews additional evidence indicating infants in second year of life are capable of communicating for sake of…

Spontaneous full passives and related constructions from 234 children, aged 2 to 13, and elicited passives from 262 college students were analyzed. The agentive non-reversible did not appear until after age 9; and until age 11 no child produced both reversible and non-reversible passives. (Author/SW)

Focus is one factor that may account for children's use of single-word utterances after they have acquired the use of multi-word utterances. The possible role that focus may play in children's use of single-word utterances in naturalistic settings, after the acquisition of syntax, was investigated. (SW)

Examined the conversations of preschool children as they completed two different tasks--a picture making task and a doll playing task. Concludes that the children's speech was primarily task-focused and that the rate of speech varied with task. (FL)

Discusses a psycholinguistic experiment investigating a child's use of relative clauses in English. (TO)