Stoel-Gammon (this issue) highlights the close and symbiotic association that exists between the lexical and phonological domains in early linguistic development. Her comprehensive review considers two bodies of literature: (1) child-centred studies; and (2) studies based on adult psycholinguistic research. Within the child-centred studies, both…

Corpora of child language are essential for research in child language acquisition and psycholinguistics. Linguistic annotation of the corpora provides researchers with better means for exploring the development of grammatical constructions and their usage. We describe a project whose goal is to annotate the English section of the CHILDES database…

There are numerous models of how speech segmentation may proceed in infants acquiring their first language. We present a framework for considering the relative merits and limitations of these various approaches. We then present a model of speech segmentation that aims to reveal important sources of information for speech segmentation, and to…

One child's unique phonological rule is reported, which increased output variety and still yielded a mismatch with the adult form. It is argued that an addition to the strategies described by Menn is needed to account for the discovery of this rule and for later stages of phonological development. (Author)

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

Uncertainty was researched as a perceptual structure which mediates the transition from sensorimotor activity to language. The guiding notions are that the attentional system is geared to uncertainty from the beginning of life and that a speaker's language use is coordinated with this system as it emerges. (Author)

A replication and extention of a previous study involved 61 children aged three to five, who were asked to carry out certain instructions. Results indicate that children do observe the distinction between definite and indefinite pronouns as it applies to quantity. (Author/RM)

Research with 24 infants revealed that reduplication is a general pattern during the earliest stages of phonological development, used most frequently by children who follow a multisyllabic rather than monosyllabic course of development. (Author)

In an experiment investigating aspects of children's comprehension of sentences containing the connective "if," young children judged correct and reversed "Y if X" and "If X, Y" sentences as "sensible" or "silly." The comprehension of the role of "if" in sentences appears to be a…

In interviews, children understood past forms equally well in reference to immediate and remote past but future forms better in reference to the immediate future. Immediacy of action and certainty of occurrence are suggested as early meaning components of future verb forms. (Author)

Reports on research that sought to clarify Brown's (1973) research on acquisition order, syntactic complexity, semantic complexity, and the relationship among the three. (Author/AM)

Describes early word usage in four children aged 1.6 to 1.9. The research investigated the children's use of words whose referents are unknown to them. (Author/AM)

The command-following behavior of holophrastic children was compared to that of telegraphic children. Four holoprastic and four telegraphic children learning English as a first language, and three holophrastic and the telegraphic children learning Spanish as a first language were tested. No significant differences were found among the four groups.…

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)

This paper reports an investigation into the acquisition of indirect object constructions by English children aged 5-10. Sentences having a prepositional "to" phrase containing the indirect object, and following the direct object, were acquired before sentences where the indirect object preceded the direct object. (CHK)