Studies that measure the effectiveness of language-training program for children's language development do not clearly identify in adult-child interaction which characteristics of educators' language are most effective, particularly for children over 4 years of age who need to develop complex syntactic skills. Our study aimed to analyze the…

Does language have a role to play in conceptual development, and if so, what is that role? Understanding the contents of another person's mind parallels the development in early childhood of mental state language. Does the conceptual understanding get reflected in and drive the language development, or does the language allow the representation of…

This article examines children's comprehension of the "get"-passive relative to the "be"-passive in an attempt to systematically compare the acquisition of both types of passives. It discusses the findings of two experiments (a picture-matching task and an act-out task) with children ages 36. Results from the picture-matching…

Research in language development has only recently begun to focus on the inherent variability of language. Previous studies have explored at what age children begin to produce variable linguistic forms and how these forms progress through development. While children produce adult-like variation early on, some variable forms take longer to acquire…

We present a series of experiments investigating English-speaking children's comprehension of "it"-clefts and "wh"-pseudoclefts. Previous developmental work has found children to have asymmetric difficulties interpreting object clefts. We show that these difficulties disappear when clefts are presented in felicitous contexts,…

The current study examined preschool children's ability to evaluate the entailment patterns yielded by sentences containing two downward entailing (DE) operators, "every" and "no." When "no" precedes "every," the entailment pattern typically licensed by "every" changes, but only if "no"…

In natural languages, the mapping from surface form to meaning is often quite complex, and hence the acquisition of the phenomena at the boundary between syntax and semantics has been one of the central issues in current acquisition research. This study addresses the issue of whether children have adult-like knowledge of LF "wh"-movement and its…

Two studies were conducted with Cantonese-speaking preschoolers examining J. de Villiers's (1995) hypothesis that syntactic complements play a unique role in the acquisition of false belief (FB). In Study 1, the authors found a positive correlation between FB and syntactic complements in 72 four- to six-year-old Cantonese-speaking preschoolers.…

The study reported here investigated the effects of using props to illustrate the meaning of sentences in a syntactic awareness task in which subjects were required to correct ungrammatical sentences. Children scored significantly higher in the props condition though the proportion of meaning-changing errors to total errors was not significantly…

A study investigated young children's knowledge of the constraint that prevents questioning from a position inside a temporal adjunct: i.e., knowledge of the ungrammaticality of a question such as "Who did Fred kiss Sue before hugging...?" Subjects were 30 children aged 3 to 5 years, who listened to stories accompanied by pictures and…

This study focuses on the development of the ability to talk about events in time -- to specify occurrence in time with reference to the present as well as to locate events in time with reference to each other. The child's learning of how to mark the different kinds of relationships between two events is discussed. This study of current relevance…

This study documents the emerging ability of children to use demonstrative expressions and definite and indefinite articles in order to establish a clear reference for the hearer in a natural discourse situation. The analysis is based primarily on transcripts of twins recorded over a period of nine months when they were 33 to 42 months old.…

This study identified structural units of language as they appeared in the speech of two- to five-year-old preschool white children in Brisbane. Electronic equipment was used to record the speech samples, which were transformed into three separate language concordances by computer analysis. These structural units of language were then compared…

In four studies, 60 two- and three-year-olds were studied in an elicited imitation task wherein the linguistic form of sentences was varied according to conjunction structure and pattern of redundancy deletion in conjunction reduction. Both factors were found to affect imitation. (Author/RM)