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.…

The relation of social and linguistic input measures to early vocabulary development was examined in 30 low-income African American mother-infant pairs. Observations were conducted when the child was 0 years, 1 month (0;1), 0;4, 0;8, 1;0, 1;6, and 2;0. Maternal input was coded for word types and tokens, contingent responsiveness, and…

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

The elicited speech of 26 Turkish children ranging in age from 2;0 to 4;6 was examined with respect to causality. The developmental sequence of the acquisition of causal connectives showed a progression from the use of no explicit connectives to the acquisition of connectives that are context-dependent. The next stage in this progression was the…

The speech of each of eight children aged 15 to 24 months was monitored in an informal setting and analyzed for the imitation of nonsense words introduced by the experimenter. In a second session, objects were introduced as referents for the nonsense words. Results failed to support the two initial hypotheses, namely that children imitate in part…

Questions asked in five play sessions by each of eight children aged 1.6 to 3.0 were analyzed for usage of the wh-interrogatives. About 93% of utterances using "what" and "where" were formulaic constructions (e.g., "Where's NP?" and "What's that thing?"). In order to determine whether children were…

The speech of two two-year-old Mandarin-speaking children was taped during free play in their homes. The following characteristics of their speech were discovered: (1) excellent, near full control of tones; (2) somewhat stricter word order than is found in adult speech (Mandarin is undergoing a word order shift from SVO to SOV); and (3) few…

The spontaneous speech of 14 children aged 2;6 to 5;6 was recorded. One additional child provided longitudinal information from age 2;4 to 5;6. In a second study, 75 children were tested for mastery of hypothetical reference in a story-telling situation. The speech samples from Study 1 and the children's answers from Study 2 were analyzed for…

Narratives about personal experiences were elicited from 33 kindergarten children in a suburb of Zurich. The narratives were analyzed for the development of the use of the particle "ebe" from a conversational context (where the use of the particle was already mastered) to an appropriate narrative context (in which the particle, as…

Describes a model that allows children to control the complexity of the speech they hear within conversations on a moment-to-moment basis. Experimental and observational data clearly delineate the reciprocal nature of how speakers "fine-tune" their speech to listeners. The effects of child-directed speech on language development are discussed.…

The spontaneous speech of seven children was monitored for "wh" questions. The children were observed longitudinally from about age 24 to 36 months. The pattern of development with regard to the deletion of non-obligatory verbs revealed that "what,""where," and "who" questions presented increasing verb…

This paper examines the referential strategies used by Japanese children and adults in two story telling tasks focusing upon the following discourse contexts: (1) first mentions of story characters, (2) references in subject position to the same character, and (3) references to another character. The subjects, 60 children and 10 adults, were…

The speech of 18 children aged 4;1 to 7;1 during role-playing sessions simulating family, doctor, and classroom situations was analyzed for the use of directives. Six categories of directive formula types were identified, and the use of each of these in each context was examined with a view to determining the child's sense of what directive is…

Longitudinal data on the language of one German-speaking child were gathered from her 16th to her 26th month. Speech acts involving "where" questions were isolated and analyzed. The following order of referential development was discovered: (1) pragmatic conditions taking the form of certain action-contexts first relieve the discourse…

Extensive longitudinal data were gathered on a child's entry into the symbolically mediated modal world by examining changes in the semantics and pragmatics of her uses of modal auxiliary verbs. The data are 53 transcripts of natural conversations between a girl, Nina, and her mother recorded periodically from her 23rd month to her 39th month. The…