Children tend to produce words earlier when they are connected to a variety of other words along the phonological and semantic dimensions. Though these semantic and phonological connectivity effects have been extensively documented, little is known about their underlying developmental mechanism. One possibility is that learning is driven by…

Child language data are notoriously noisy. Children may produce several phonetic variants for a given word or use the same forms for several different words. As such, child data are characterized by little apparent systematicity. Competing theories have arisen to account for a range of problematic phenomena, but each has struggled to relate child…

This paper focuses on the acquisition of locative prepositional phrases in L1 Norwegian. We report on two production experiments with children acquiring Norwegian as their first language and compare the results to similar experiments conducted with Russian children. The results of the experiments show that Norwegian children at age 2 regularly…

Stoel-Gammon (this issue) highlights the close and symbiotic association that exists between the lexical and phonological domains in early linguistic development. Her comprehensive review considers two bodies of literature: (1) child-centred studies; and (2) studies based on adult psycholinguistic research. Within the child-centred studies, both…

In her interesting article, Stoel-Gammon (this issue) reviews studies concerning the interactions between lexical and phonological development. While the focus of the review is on vocabulary production from children acquiring American English, she also suggests that cross-linguistic research be undertaken to examine how universal and…

Parent report has proven a valid and cost-effective means of evaluating early child language. Norming datasets for these instruments, which provide the basis for standardized comparisons of individual children to a population, can also be used to derive norms for the acquisition of individual words in production and comprehension and also early…

The main objective of this paper is to describe the trajectory of Danish children's early lexical development relative to other languages, by comparing a Danish study based on the Danish adaptation of "The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories" (CDI) to 17 comparable CDI-studies. The second objective is to address the feasibility…

This article focuses on the meaning of nonfinite clauses ("root infinitives") in Dutch and English child language. I present experimental and naturalistic data confirming the claim that Dutch root infinitives are more often modal than English root infinitives. This cross-linguistic difference is significantly smaller than previously assumed,…

The development of devices used to coin agent and instrument nouns in Hebrew was investigated among 60 children aged 3, 4, 5, 7, and 11. The prevalent word-formation device in Hebrew is the triconsonantal root combined with vowel patterns. Other available devices include suffixation, conversion, and compounding. Questions designed to elicit…

Looks at naturalistic samples of adult-to-child speech to determine whether variations in the input are consistent with reported variations in the proportions of nouns and verbs in children's early vocabularies. Naturalistic speech samples from English-, Italian-, and Mandarin-speaking children and their caregivers were examined. (Author/JL)

Notes that in linguistic theory, phenomena previously handled by a separate grammatical component have been moved into the lexicon and that in some theories, the contrast between grammar and the lexicon has vanished. Concludes that the case for a modular distinction between grammar and the lexicon has been overstated and that the evidence to date…

Investigates children's early lexical development in English and Korean and compares caregivers' linguistic input in the two languages. Results indicate that young Korean children use verbs productively with appropriate inflections and that, unlike in English, both verbs and nouns in Korean are dominant categories from the single-word stage. (39…

Discusses construction of the Hebrew Communicative Development Inventory (HCDI), an adaptation of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (MCDI). The HCDI was administered to a stratified sample of Israeli mothers of 253 toddlers. Results are presented and compared with scores from the MCDI. Results indicate that conclusions concerning…

Essays on lexicon and vocabulary development, all in French, address these topics: bilingual lexicon in the context of translation; lexical and conceptual representation in bilinguals; pronouns in "existential" constructions in French and English; configurational functions within grammar; Gustaf Stern's diachronic semantic schema; the…

The collection of essays and studies concerning generative grammar and first and second language acquisition includes: "The Optional-Infinitive Stage in Child English: Evidence from Negation" (Tony Harris, Ken Wexler); "Towards a Structure-Building Model of Acquisition" (Andrew Radford); "The Underspecification of…