Causation is a core feature of human cognition and language. How children learn about intricate causal meanings is yet unresolved. Here, we focus on how children learn verbs that express causation. Such verbs, known as lexical causatives (e.g., break and raise), lack explicit morphosyntactic markers indicating causation, thus requiring that the…

Using a cross-linguistic approach, we investigated Turkish-speaking children's acquisition and use of relative clauses (RCs) by examining longitudinal child-caregiver interactions and cross-sectional peer conversations. Longitudinal data were collected from 8 children between the ages of 8 and 36 months. Peer conversational corpus came from 78…

From the beginning of life, a child's acts of meaning are joint constructions, enacted through dialogue between himself and a significant other by reference to whom he is achieving a personal identity. When the child begins to control his material environment, he begins the transition to systematic symbolic construction. At the same time, he is…

This article on sampling early semantic productions reports a study of 6 children (ages 31-35 months) with specific language impairments. Subjects produced a greater frequency and diversity of multiword utterances in a free-play sampling situation than in a joint action routine sampling situation. (JDD)

This volume contains working papers on a variety of topics in linguistics. They include: "A View of Phonology from a Cognitive and Functional Perspective" (Joan Bybee); "The Geography of Language Shift: Distance from the Mexican Border and Spanish Language Claiming in the Southwestern United States" (Garland D. Bills, Eduardo…

Papers from the proceedings are: "Cultural Universals in the Acquisition of Language;""The Acquisition of Locative Constructions in Cantonese Children"; "The Acquisition of VOT: Is It Language-Dependent?"; "Flexibility in Semantic Representations: Children's Ability To Switch among Different Interpretations of 'Big' and 'Little'"; "Multifunctional…