If a child asks a friend to play football and the friend replies, 'I have a cough', the requesting child must make a 'relevance inference' to determine the communicative intent. Relevance inferencing is a key component of pragmatics, that is, the ability to integrate social context into language interpretation and use. We tested which cognitive…

Language and vocabulary represent the very foundation of learning to read and write. Children who do not develop strong oral language skills and vocabulary in these early years will find it difficult to keep pace with their peers. Children use the natural medium of language for thinking. Those who acquire a substantial vocabulary are often able to…

The influence of information level on the production of accuracy of 20 children was examined. Data were children's productions of nouns in sets of utterances referring to triplets of pictures representing noun-verb-noun utterances. (Author/JL)