This study investigates children's acquisition of the distinction between direct speech (Elephant said, "I get the football") and indirect speech ("Elephant said that he gets the football"), by measuring children's interpretation of first, second, and third person pronouns. Based on evidence from various linguistic sources, we…

Recent evidence from adult pronoun comprehension suggests that semantic factors such as verb transitivity affect referent salience and thereby anaphora resolution. We tested whether the same semantic factors influence pronoun comprehension in young children. In a visual world study, 3-year-olds heard stories that began with a sentence containing…

The early noncry vocalizations of infants are salient social signals. Caregivers spontaneously respond to 30%-50% of these sounds, and their responsiveness to infants' prelinguistic noncry vocalizations facilitates the development of phonology and speech. Have infants learned that their vocalizations influence the behavior of social partners? If…

The purpose of this study was to describe the strategies mothers employ to elicit clarifying information from their children in a situation in which the children were reporting a past event. Forty 2-year-old children individually participated in a mock birthday party with the experimenter. Immediately afterwards, the mothers (20 of whom had…

An investigation of children's ability to convey and respond to requests for action was based on the spontaneous speech of 36 dyads of nursery school children (3;6--5;7). Examinations of the contexts of direct requests indicated that speaker and addressee shared an understanding of the interpersonal meaning factors relevant to requesting.…

Twelve one-word-stage children were given minimally contrasting two-word instructions. Since non-linguistic cues were eliminated, comprehension involved making non-syntactic inferences from the word combinations. The children could respond correctly to some of the instructions, and even carried out some unfamiliar activities. (Author/SW)

Reports on a study of the language acquisition of a group of Portuguese children who belonged to two socioeconomic backgrounds: upper middle class and lower class. Aims to show that verbal formulation, referential non-linguistic material pragmatic cues, and cognitive factors play decisive roles in language development. (SED)

Children's pragmatic abilities were studied focusing on "requesting" in a group of 30 language impaired children (three to nine years old). There was a predominant usage of direct forms with only a slight increase of indirect ones in the older group. (Author/SEW)

Forty-eight pupils from grades one, three, and five participated in a study of the extent to which children are able to use their prior knowledge and expectancies to aid them in integrating verbal material and in drawing appropriate inferences. Six stories were constructed for each of four inference levels, and 11 questions were prepared for each…

This work investigated the young child's ability to respond appropriately to the intended, as opposed to the literal, meaning of one class of such utterances, requests for action. An action-based response heuristic is proposed to explain the apparent ability of two-year-olds to deal with indirect speech acts. (Author/SW)

Errors in reading and speaking are not the result of failure to comprehend or communicate. Rather, such errors are "miscues," which show the effects of psycholinguistic processes that have taken unexpected turns. The nature of these miscues reveals the underlying cognitive schema that guide a person's comprehension and verbalization. (Author/SJL)

In this experiment, children were given three words (a triplet made up of two nouns and one verb) and were asked to produce an utterance with them. The results were analyzed in terms of word order chosen and age of child. (NCR)

Starting with a model for explaining comprehension and noncomprehension of verbal material in terms of a match/mismatch principle, this project developed a scale of language usage and explored hypotheses about how comprehension may become possible if a child does not now comprehend some particular oral or written text. Eight separate reports are…

This volume reports on several aspects of the Bristol (England) study of language development in pre-school children. The study was comprised of two overlapping investigations: the first covering the range from 15 to 42 months and the second, the range from 39 to 66 months. The introductory chapter gives an overview, and provides a statement of…

Children's early utterances were studied to determine whether there are developmental changes in the content, context, frequency, and form of their speech and the degree to which the changes correspond to changes in Piagetian cognitive stage. Twenty children were studied; six were 10 or 11 months old, and the remaining 14 were distributed evenly…