The spontaneous speech of two Zulu girls was monitored for use of nominals. The data for one girl, 23 months, are reported in detail. Analysis of prefixed and prefixless nouns in isolated citation forms and in syntactic construction revealed that the child perceived the internal structure of nouns before the age of two, although the prefix often…

Children ranging in age from 1;1 to 1;3 were presented with 16 contrived lexical concepts, each consisting of a nonsense word (eight object words and eight action words) and four unfamiliar exemplars that served as the referents for that word. Overall, the children used 65% of the experimental words one or more times to refer to at least one of…

This paper examines Wittgenstein's conception of a language game. It is contended that there is, as yet, no linguistic science and that a great deal more deep philosophical imagining and "playing" is needed before we have enough knowledge to develop a real science of language. Similarly, superficial and over-literary British…

Examines spontaneous conversations between adults and children. Findings indicate that adults' altered mean length of utterance and type-token ratio were based on their age. Contrary to the researcher's expectations, the adults did not choose their words from the 10,000 most common word types in an age-dependent manner. (Author/CB)

Describes a study that analyzed and described humorous productions of deaf children and the reaction of other deaf children to those productions. One finding was that primarily verbal humor was appreciated more by older children with hearing parents; humor characterized by sign complexity, by children with deaf parents. (SED)

The author argues that a child is linguistically sophisticated by the time he starts school and that his language should be respected even if it does not fit the correct" pattern of the school. (MM)

Four words that cause the highest incidence of error in the English language are discussed. (CK)

One child's unique phonological rule is reported, which increased output variety and still yielded a mismatch with the adult form. It is argued that an addition to the strategies described by Menn is needed to account for the discovery of this rule and for later stages of phonological development. (Author)

A case is reported of failure to supply negation in tag questions for a period of nearly two years. It is argued that such cases, which have been explained in terms of limited processing capacity, are equally compatible with an explanation in terms of context-specific knowledge. (Author)

Analysis of a database of tag questions in children's speech shed light on their structure and function. (JB)

Applies two fundamental principles of optimalist theory to yield predictions about cluster reduction patterns. (Author/VWL)

Gender agreement elicitation was used with Russian children to examine how diminutives common in Russian child-directed speech affect gender learning. Children were shown pictures of familiar and novel animals and asked to describe them after hearing their names, which contained regular morphophonological cues to masculine or feminine gender.…

Reanalyzes production data from three French children to make two basic points. Shows that tense and agreement inflection follow independent courses of acquisition (in child French). Using a mechanism of grammatical development based on partial rankings of constraints, analysis successfully models over three stages the frequency with which…

Shares childhood experiences of singing while staying with older relatives. Recounts the feelings of a small child dealing with the death of a favorite aunt. (MG)