Understanding how a child's language system develops into an adult-like system is a central question in language development research. An increasingly influential account proposes that the brain constantly generates top-down predictions and matches them against incoming input, with higher-level cognitive models serving to minimize prediction…

The comprehension of paired wh-questions is examined in child Mandarin, to compare the age of acquisition with that of children speaking European languages like English and German. In Study 1, participants were 734 Mandarin speakers aged 2;6-7;11, drawn from four regions of China. Results reveal a striking parallel between the acquisition of…

In this study, 5-year-olds and adults described scenes that differed according to whether (a) the subject or object of a transitive verb represented an accessible or inaccessible referent, consistent or inconsistent with patterns of preferred argument structure, and (b) a simple noun was sufficient to uniquely identify an inaccessible referent.…

It was determined that suprasegmental features effect the ability of very young children (3 years) to decide whether strings of words are to be treated as sentences or nonsentences, whereas for adults and older children grammatical cues alone suffice. (FWB)

The effect of grammatical phonological rules (those in English) and nongrammatical (those in other languages) on the learning and reproduction of morpheme-length utterances and the role of maturation on this effect were examined. Children preschool through second grade were the subjects. There were no significant differences at any grade level…

Forty third-graders and an equal number of sixth-graders listened to a list of words and for each word had to indicate, by saying "old" or "new," whether it had appeared before on the list or not. The subjects gave more erroneous "old" responses to words which were semantically or phonetically related to previously heard words than to control…

This report, the third of a series of reports dealing with convergent communication among children, compares children's performance on certain communication tasks with that of adults. (Convergent communication is defined as communication in which two persons cooperatively exchange information in order to reach an explicitly stated goal and where,…

Analysis showed that the majority of subjects applied a coherent strategy to three-word utterances presented in different word orders, and confirmed the existence of two primitive strategies. (Authors/CB)

The learning and retention performances of children and adults were compared on free and serialized reproductions of meaningful words. Although the children took longer than the adults to reach the learning criterion, and short-term retention was equivalent for both groups, the children displayed a superior serial recall at 7-day retention.…

Results of tests comparing the ability of children and adults to understand and produce sentences according to type (active, question, passive, negative) and complexity (simple, center-embedding, double-embedding). (Author/FWB)

Tests on children between five and nine led to the conclusion that children's ability to recognize synonymous structures is progressively developed over a period of years and that there is a scale of difficulty involved. Paper presented at the National Association for Foreign Student Affairs Annual Conference, May 1969. (FWB)

A study investigated how children report epistemic modality and focused on two main questions: (1) How do children reproduce modal devices that are present in the original (to-be-reported) discourse? and (2) How do children use different linguistic means of quotation--direct, indirect, or other--in this situation? Sixty monolingual French-speaking…

This paper presents a study of metalinguistic awareness in young children. Metalinguistic awareness refers to the child's ability to concentrate on the sounds and patterns of language rather than on its communicative aspects. Metalinguistic awareness was studied by analyzing the verbal play and verbal games of 149 children from 6 months to 10…

Recent work in syntactic theory has revealed that word order is more constrained in subordinate clauses, particularly nonasserted clauses, than in main clauses (Ross, 1973; Hooper & Thompson, 1973). On the other hand, main clauses are restricted in the extent to which they allow pronominalization and verb phrase deletion (Lakoff, 1968). These…

This paper discusses the interpretation of data on two types of phonological change: change in language over time in the culture, and change in the development of the individual speaker; and examines the position that these two sorts of change interact in a certain way in relation to phonological structure. If one conceives of phonology as a…