Examines a corpus of narratives produced by preschool children, and focuses on differences among the three age groups with respect to: (1) complexity, (2) the relationship between story elements and the discursive context, (3) relationship between story elements and extralinguistic context, and (4) shaping of the narrative as story and as part of…

To explore adjective language development and examine its relationship to seriation, several tasks were given to 40 children aged 4-8. Comprehension and production of adjective forms were measured--vocabulary, coordination, comparison. Ability to order objects by size was used to assess intuitive-level seriation. (CHK)

Fourteen two-year-olds were presented with minimal word pairs in a new and efficient experimental perception paradigm. Data provide a view of relative difficulty of various minimal phonological contrasts for children. (CHK)

In a previous paper, J. Hurford accounts for errors in children's question forms by postulating that children incorrectly internalize adult rules. This article suggests that this rule is inconsistent and unjestified, and that such errors are due to segmentation problems and processing limitations. (CHK)

Experiments in eliciting true/false judgments from young children aged 3-5 used a "talking doll," a toy panda with a speaker installed. The procedure has been used in studies of language comprehension, communication skills, and free conversation experiments. (CHK)

This article criticizes a previous paper that stressed a transformational analysis of children's question acquisition. It is argued that a surface structure generalization analysis makes empirically correct predictions about mistakes both in acquisition of inverted word order and in the form of "wh" questions. (CHK)

Children aged 2 1/2-4 were asked questions containing comparative and superlative forms of adjectives in pairs designated as unmarked/marked or positive/negative. Differences in frequency of correct responses were greater between unmarked/marked pairs than between positive/negative pairs. No evidence appeared for a marking explanation of adjective…

This paper outlines a proposal to cover four very early stages for the acquisition of negation systems in natural languages. It emphasizes the formal linguistic devices as the major variables that determine the various language-specific developmental sequences. (CHK)

Examined young children's language productivity with newly learned forms by teaching them four new words: two nouns and two verbs. Findings indicate children combined the novel nouns productively with already known words much more often than they did the novel verbs--by many orders of magnitude and several children pluralized the new nouns,…

Examines the possibility that bilingual experience in infancy may affect the unfolding of vocal precursors to speech. The results of this longitudinal study indicate that infants reared in bilingual and monolingual environments manifested similar ages of onset for canonical babbling (production of well-formed syllables), an event fundamentally…

Examines the acquisition of new sound changes by 3- and 4-year-old children in asymmetrical child care situations. Results reveal that the children had acquired the changes and emphasize that the dialect transmission period begins before the age of maximal peer group influence. The findings support the possibility that child care asymmetry affects…

The influence of information level on the production of accuracy of 20 children was examined. Data were children's productions of nouns in sets of utterances referring to triplets of pictures representing noun-verb-noun utterances. (Author/JL)

Notes that psycholinguists have studied "fast mapping," and behavior analysts have studied the phenomenon of"learning by exclusion." Reviews the research protocols, questions, and outcomes of these two research lines to show their clear similarities, to support the argument that both disciplines are studying a single…

Reports on the continuing study of a congenitally acochlear child using an analytical focus on the prelinguistic vocalizations involving the description of syllable groupings within a prosodic hierarchy. Results indicate that audition is not necessary for the formation of prelinguistic phrasing, but hearing does influence certain aspects of…

Presents evidence that the supposed paradox in which infants find abstract patterns in speech-like stimuli whereas even some preschoolers struggle to find abstract syntactic patterns within meaningful language is no paradox. Asserts that all research evidence shows that young children's syntactic constructions become abstract in a piecemeal…