Study of 3 and 7 year olds and adults examined role that changes in continuity, direction, instrument, and causative agent play in children's and adults' initial assumptions about meaning of novel motion verbs and events. Subjects made similar initial assumptions, but children generalized more conservatively than adults to all change types in…

Argues that the data used to claim that morphosyntactic development of Italian-speaking children are inconsistent with nativist, parameter-setting models of language development is irrelevant to the specific hypothesis being evaluated. (25 references) (JL)

Samples of the language used by 4 children were recorded longitudinally between 1.5 and 3 years of age. Children's expressions of motion were categorized into expressions involving a source, path, or goal of motion. There were developmental changes, including an increase in the use of words relating to goals as children grew older. (BC)

The FG syndrome is characterized by unusual facies; sudden infant death; developmental delay; and abnormalities of the cardiac, gastrointestinal, and central nervous systems. Serial evaluations of one case with isolated agenesis of the corpus callosum found consistent patterns over time in specific language impairments in syntactic and…

Presents fine-grained longitudinal analyses of one child's language production over the period of change from single to multiword utterances. (Author/VWL)

The goal of this special issue on Interfaces is to explore the division of labor between pragmatics and grammar. In the introductory paper a system of different modules and interface mappings has been presented. Some suggestions were made where the job of the acquisition process is. It was posed that most, if not all, acquisition is in the mapping…

The assessment of nonword repetition in children goes back at least to 1974, when the Goldman-Fristoe-Woodcock Auditory Skills Battery was published, including a subtest (Sound Mimicry) assessing nonword repetition (Goldman, Fristoe, & Woodcock, 1974). Nevertheless, it was not until 20 years later, when Gathercole and Baddeley (1990) reported a…

Psycholinguistic research has shown that the influence of abstract syntactic knowledge on performance is shaped by particular sentences that have been experienced. To explore this idea, the authors applied a connectionist model of sentence production to the development and use of abstract syntax. The model makes use of (a) error-based learning to…

Cross-linguistic borrowing (overt use of words from the other language) and transfer (use of semantic or syntactic structures from the other language without active switching to that language) were examined during language production in Russian-English bilinguals. Grammatical category (noun/verb) and level of concreteness were found to influence…

It is proposed here that second language learners can acquire a system of reflexive binding, both local and long-distance, that is different from that found in their native language, and individual subject data are offered to support this claim. First, some general properties of the syntactic behavior of reflexives and reflexive constructions are…

A study investigated young children's knowledge of the constraint that prevents questioning from a position inside a temporal adjunct: i.e., knowledge of the ungrammaticality of a question such as "Who did Fred kiss Sue before hugging...?" Subjects were 30 children aged 3 to 5 years, who listened to stories accompanied by pictures and…

Transcripts of 24 spontaneous speech samples from 2 year old children are analyzed for use of nouns and pronouns in sentences. (Author/DEP)

In a study about the comprehension of anaphoric relationships in text, three anaphoric ties in forward (antecedent-anaphor) and backward (anaphor-antecedent) position were examined with attention to developmental trends. A four-school sample was used, three in the United States and one in New Zealand. A test of comprehension of anaphoric…

The study compared the language development of 72 learning disabled (LD) and 72 normal students at intermediate and secondary age levels (9-12 and 12-15 years of age). Ss were asked to respond to questions after viewing two films, and oral language samples were tape recorded and analyzed to examine syntactic and vocabulary development. Results…

The influence of maternal use of verbs upon a child's developing rule system for verb usage was examined. Previously reported data (Brown, 1983) on mother-to-child speech were analyzed. Thirteen different contexts for verb use were identified. There was a close resemblance between the way the child and his mother distributed their uses of verbs.…