This study explored Mandarin-speaking mothers' referential choice in relation to informativeness. The data consisted of two Mandarin-speaking mothers' natural conversation with their children, collected when the children were between the ages of 2;2 and 3;1. The subject and object arguments of the mothers' utterances were coded for the categories…

Longitudinal studies of the application of a paraphrasing model to 18- to 28-month-olds indicated that mean length of utterance was significantly correlated with realized and paraphrased frequencies of several linguistic items in the subjects' corpora. The model was productive for examining children's corpora of speech and the linguistic…

A longitudinal study of four 17- to 33-month-olds revealed that their linguistic selection at the one-word stage was governed by principles of informativeness, while the two-word stage was characterized by new, or a combination of new and old, information. (Author/CB)