Examines one component of an African Grey parrot's monologue behavior, private speech, while he was being taught new vocalizations. The data are discussed in terms of the possible functions of monologues during the parrot's acquisition of novel vocalizations. (85 references) (GLR)

Examined data for two Danish children to determine subject omission, verb usage, and sentence subjects. Found that children exhibit asymmetry in subject omission according to verb type as subjects are omitted from main verb utterances more frequently than from copula utterances. Concluded that treatment of child subject omission should involve…

Deaf persons do not see their deafness as a disability and have a strong sense of community and identity. Different approaches to language development in deaf people have an impact on the subsequent level of deaf literacy. (JOW)

Reviews study of toddlers' responses to specific and neutral requests for clarification, focusing on ability to locate linguistic errors that provoked clarification requests and their successes in repair. Argues that this behavior provides evidence for a speech monitor that detects errors and enables repair. Suggests that metalinguistic ability…

Examines connectionist simulations indicating that starting with simplified inputs or limited memory is not necessary in training recurrent neural networks to learn pseudo-natural languages; such restrictions hinder acquisition. Suggests that Gold's theorem and possible lack of explicit negative evidence do not implicate innate,…

This study utilized the head-turn preference procedure in four experiments to determine whether 1-year-old infants could extract and remember information from auditory strings produced by miniature artificial grammar. Findings indicated that subjects generalized to the new structure by discriminating new grammatical strings from ungrammatical ones…

Analyzes different strategies used by speakers/writers and hearers/readers to deal with underspecified coherence relations, phrased in terms of Horn's (1984) Q- and R- principle. Presents data from the psycholinguistic literature on the interpretation of underspecified relations and data from language-acquisition research suggesting that both…

An account of grammatical acquisition is developed within the parameter setting framework applied to a generalized categorical grammar (GCG). Computational simulation shows that several resulting acquisition procedures are effective on a parameter set expressing major typological distinctions based on constituent order, and defining 70 distinct…

This study explored the sensitivity of 20 10- to 11-month-old infants to the phonological characteristics of their native language. Tone-probe event-related potentials were obtained for subjects listening to a story, either with normal English function morphemes or modified with atypical function morphemes. Results suggest that the 11-month-olds,…

Reports on a study into the acquisition of Welsh and English phonology in Welsh-English bilingual children. Concentrates on the acquisition of the rhotic consonants--the trilled -r of Welsh and the approximant -r of English. (Author/VWL)

Two studies examined word frequencies in toddlers' lexicons using the Language Development Survey (LDS). In Study 1, a high degree of consistency in LDS word frequencies was found in the lexicons of 758 24-month-olds. In Study 2, LDS word frequencies in 40 late talkers found both lexicon size and age of subject influenced the degree of consistency…

Looks at what William Stokoe taught educators about teaching deaf children. Among his ideas were that signing is more than just a away to communicate, deaf children should begin to acquire sign language during their infant years, teaching begins with a commitment to one's beliefs, good teachers are innovative thinkers, and it is important to look…

Different interactions of two common phenomena--final consonant omission and vowel lengthening before voiced consonants--are examined with a focus on a case study of two young children with phonological delays in their acquisition of English. Argues that at least some developmental opacity effects support sympathy and that such effects emerge in…

Examined use of word order and animacy for interpretation of sentences by typically-developing and language delayed children. Results indicate that typically-developing 2-year-olds use neither cue consistently to interpret sentences; typically-developing 2.5-year-olds used a coalition of word order and animacy cues; and language-delayed…

Comparison of the performance of 25 subjects with autism and 25 nonautistic subjects with mental retardation found all subjects able to comprehend the personal pronouns "I,""you," and "me." However, autistic subjects were less likely to employ the pronoun "me" in a visual perspective-taking task and to say "you" to refer to the experimenter.…