Seventy-nine children (ages 3 through 7) were asked to discriminate between the speech (fluent and disfluent) of two puppets, identify the one who "speaks like you," and evaluate their speech. Children from age 3 showed evidence of some awareness of disfluencies but most children reached full awareness at 5. Negative evaluation of…

Infants heard sentences in which prosodic structure was either consistent or inconsistent with the syntactic structure. Results suggest that the prosodic information in an individual sentence is not always sufficient to assign a syntactic structure and that learners must engage in active inferential processes to arrive at the correct syntactic…

Reviews the history of applied linguistics together with the history of the journal "Language Learning," indicating the journal's particular place in that larger history and honoring its 50th anniversary. (Author/JL)

Assessed 2-year olds' ability to use semantic context to infer meanings of novel nouns and to retain those meanings. Found that children learned majority of novel words; however, they occasionally failed to choose the correct corresponding picture for a novel noun even when they understood the verb; also found a significant retention of newly…

Presents case studies of the production of fricatives, affricates, and liquids--late-developing consonants--in the babbling of infants in an English-speaking environment. These consonants are compared with early-developing consonants--stops, nasals, and glides. Results provide evidence for the frame dominance conception but suggests early rarity…

Investigated relationships between language acquisition and temperamental attentional control and positive affectivity in toddlers. Found that language development was associated positively with adaptability and soothability, mood and smiling/laughter, and persistence and duration of orientation. Findings suggest that temperament may influence…

Assessed the language development of 2,898 pairs of 2-year-old twins born in England and Wales using the MacArthur Communicative language Development Inventory, which assesses vocabulary and grammar. Moderate heritabilities were found for both. (Author/VWL)

Examines the acquisition of Japanese numeral classifiers in Japanese preschool children, with a primary emphasis on developing comprehension ability. Argues that different techniques and stimulus contrast sets reveal a much greater sensitivity to semantic relations in young children than was previously considered possible. (Author/VWL)

Describes the lessons learned in the creation of a special assessment instrument, a large-scale survey of the language and literacy skills of linguistic minorities in England and Wales, findings of which were reported elsewhere. The test construction process was found to be highly empirical and inductive, based on trial and error rather than…

Investigated children's acquisition of short- and long-distance "whose"-questions to see whether children know that, in English, the entire "whose"-phrase must pied-pipe to the specifier of complementizer. Subjects were English-speaking children, ages 4-6. phrase. (Author/VWL)

Two studies examined the ability of typically developing children and children with phonological disorders to discriminate consonant-vowel- consonant words that differ only in the final consonant in whole word and gated conditions. Results suggest there is a complex relationship among word learning skills, ability to attend to fine phonetic…

Two experiments examined children's semantic representations and semantic naming errors. Results suggested that functional and physical properties are core aspects of object representations in the semantic lexicon and that the degree of semantic knowledge makes words more or less vulnerable to retrieval failure. Discussion focuses on the dynamic…

Surveys recent research on the first and second language acquisition of temporal and aspectual properties of natural languages. Three recently published books are discussed in the context of the primacy or aspect hypothesis and the prototype, the connectionist, and the discourse explanations for the attested acquisition sequences. (Author/VWL)

Discusses three themes that involve linguistic situations that have their roots in the extreme mobility that has characterized societies since the late 1940's: social typology of immigrnat-based societies andinsular socities; acquisition of native phonology by immigrant offspring; interlopers as agents of linguistic change. (Author/VWL)

A variety of positions have been proposed to explain the ontological development of functional categories. These positions follow either a maturation or continuity perspective. This article examined the acquisition of inflectional phrase and determiner phrase in children acquiring French and English simultaneously in order to evaluate the…