While children aged 1;10 and 2;1 show only a modest rate of mapping novel nouns onto unfamiliar rather than familiar objects, children aged 1;4 and 1;8 show a high rate. Two studies with young 2-year olds found the noun-mapping preference prevalent, but unless initial choices are strongly reinforced, increase in salience of familiar kinds lures…

A study of 5-year olds' ability to distinguish promises from predictions was suspected to have achieved its results due to methodological problems. A similar study with 32 children ages 5 to 6 that used several variations of the previous study's procedures was found to have similar results, suggesting the earlier findings were an accurate…

Compared 6-month-old hearing infants' responsiveness to infant-directed and adult-directed signing. Results replicated those found with deaf infants, namely that infants showed greater attentional and affective responsiveness to infant-directed sign than to adult-directed sign, suggesting that infants are prepared to detect sign motherese…

Used growth curves and dynamic-systems modeling to examine early lexical and grammatical development of one male child. Found that lexical development described a pattern of logistic growth. Plural growth began after reaching a threshold in vocabulary size. Lexical growth slowed as plural growth increased, and increased when plural use reached…

Explored patterns of consistency and change in maternal reminiscing style across conversations with different young children in the same family. Found that mothers evidenced striking stylistic consistency. Mothers' use of a stylistic dimension with one child predicted her use of the same dimension with the other child, above the variance accounted…

Six children were studied from the age of 6 months to 1 year and 6 months to chart their developing comprehension vocabularies from the first to the 100th word. Observational data were used in the first instance to identify newly comprehended words and then controlled testing was carried out for each word to confirm and expand the observational…

Addresses the fate of languages acquired during childhood that have not been used in a long time to find out if they are lost, overridden by other languages acquired later, or maintained despite a lack of use. German subjects were tested for their knowledge of Dutch, which they acquired as a second language during childhood. (Author/VWL)

Explores research on development of integrated speech-gesture system from its origins during the one-word period of language learning through childhood. Concludes that, although there may be a brief period prior to onset of two-word speech during which gesture and speech are not well integrated, ability to convey and interpret speech and gestures…

Examined how object shape, taxonomic relatedness, and prior lexical knowledge influenced children's overextensions (e.g., referring to pomegranates as apples). Researchers presented items that disentangled the three factors and used a novel comprehension task where children could indicate negative exemplars. Error patterns differed by task and by…

Examined the effect of regional accent on children's processing of speech. Children ages 4 to 7 were tested on their ability to repeat and define single words presented in their own and another accent. Word comprehension was significantly reduced in the other accent. Younger children performed less successfully and showed different error patterns…

Examines arguments that language comes from innate, abstract knowledge of universal grammar that signers use to create new grammatical features. (12 references) (CK)

Analyzes the speech of a German-French bilingual boy and observes two major developmental phases: (1) one characterized by object drop similar to that seen in Chinese; and (2) one characterized by the acquisition of the object clitic paradigm and a shift to an adult-like morphological licensing mechanism. (84 references) (Author/CK)

Discusses a school study of the evolution of a child language. A software program was developed to challenge Italian children in sentence structuring, motivate their sentence production in a game, provide feedback on the linguistic structure and the game context, and classify linguistic productions. (26 references) (Author/CK)

Monolingual Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 2 and 4 were given two structured tasks that assessed the contrastive use of "se" for coding these functions. Results suggest there is a differential order of acquisition of the clitic "se," whereby children initially contrast regular and reflexive with nonreflexive…

Presents longitudinal data from simultaneously bilingual German-English children with respect to development of negation and syntactically related modal particles. Data provide evidence for both language separation and cross-linguistic influence. Relative order of verbs and sequential modifiers appears not to be a principled syntactic operation,…