Compares older and newer methods of studying language acquisition in younger and older toddlers in an attempt to explain discrepancies in the literature concerning whether girls are more advanced than boys in language acquisition. (SS)

Discusses language development in children and describes how instructional television programs can contribute to that development. (DD)

This study examined the relationship between syntax discrimination and other language skills with 50 children each in kindergarten, first grade and second grade. Also, the children were asked to imitate and show comprehension of normal and scrambled grammar sentences. (Author/JH)

The Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) procedure was used to collect normative information about the syntax development of male and female children. (SB)

Examined a blank comparison method for evaluating emergent symbol mapping and learning of new word: picture matching relations by 3- to 5-year olds. Found that the method had considerable promise for advancing theoretical analyses of emergent mapping in behavior analytic and developmental language research. (KB)

Investigated whether learning the distinction between substance names and object names is conceptually or linguistically driven, by repeating Soja et al.'s study with English- and Japanese-speaking children. (Japanese does not make the count-mass grammatical distinction proposed to contribute to learning the distinction.) Found evidence for…

Highlights methodological issues that impact phonetic-phonological data collection and interpretation in studies of early language differentiation. Issues include language context, bilingual versus monolingual mode, and adult listening bias. Presents data from two bilingual children, aged 4 and 2, learning Japanese and English. (Author/VWL)

Three experiments investigated the role of oppositional predicate dimensionally in 4- and 5-year-old children's processing of negation. Children often recalled negated items as affirmations, which suggests that children's use of predicate dimensionally contributes to non-classical processing. (Author/VWL)

Two experiments are discussed--one with normal 3 to 5-year-olds and one with language impaired 4 to 5-year-olds--that investigated the role of inflections in verb learning. Findings point to a developmental period during which children treat inflectional cues as reliable guides to verb meaning. Focuses on the rise and fall of such inflectional…

Discusses the question of whether inborn mechanisms underlying linguistic development include actual grammatical categories and principles or are of a more general character. Recent proposals suggest a possible convergence of views on this matter, with implications for the study of both first language acquisition and second language learning.…

Reports results of an acquisition experiment with a group of Spanish-speaking children regarding their knowledge of a semantic restriction that prevents a referring expression from coreferring with a pronoun in certain syntactic configurations if its referent lacks consciousness. Sixteen children participated in a modified Truth-Value Judgment…

This study examined difficulties in the use of -ed as passive participle or as past tense in 12 young children with specific language impairment. Results suggest that either the surface properties of -ed are related to the difficulty or these children have a separate, non-tense- related deficit in the area of verb morphology. (Contains…

Considers the concept that education and learning are physiological events worthy of classification within the health and wellness movement of health care. Discusses the meaning and purpose of education; education in transition; the need for a new paradigm; learning and health, including Alzheimer's disease; and language development and the…

Argues for the need to reconcile symbolist and connectionist accounts of second language learning by propounding nine claims, aimed at integrating accounts of representation, processing, and acquisition of second language knowledge. Advocates a nonnativist, emergentist view of first language learning and adopts a version of what could be called a…

Suggests that the systematic omission of functional material by young children, contrary to current beliefs, argues for the presence of functional structure,because in the absence of such structure what is expected is not a systematic omission of functional material but rather its random use. (Author/VWL)