Two experiments investigated 4-year-olds' use of descriptive sentences to learn non-obvious properties of unfamiliar kinds. Novel creatures were described using generic or nongeneric sentences (e.g., "These are pagons. Pagons/These pagons are friendly"). Children's willingness to extend the described property to a new category member was then…

First written in 1986, prior to the many findings concerning the optionality of finiteness and the root infinitive phenomenon, this article attempts to extend the parameter-setting model of grammatical development to the acquisition of inflectional morphology. I propose that the Stem Parameter, which states that a stem is/is not a well-formed word…

One way children improve their pronunciation of monosyllabic words is via clarification requests, specifically, the adult saying an incorrect production that differs from the child's incorrect production (Weiner and Ostrowski, 1979). The aim of this study was to investigate children's responses to clarification requests when producing polysyllabic…

Two studies test the hypotheses that individual differences in phonological memory among children younger than two years can be assessed using a non-word repetition task (NWR) and that these differences are related to the children's rates of vocabulary development. NWR accuracy, real word repetition accuracy and productive vocabulary were assessed…

The aim of this study was to uncover factors accounting for the ability of children with specific language impairment (SLI) to learn agreement morphemes in intervention. Twenty-five children with SLI who participated in a six-month intervention program focused on teaching third person singular -s or auxiliary "is"/"are"/"was" showed a wide range…

This study examined early vocal production to assess whether it is possible to identify predictors of vocabulary development prior to the age point at which lexical delay is usually identified. Characteristics of babbling and first words in 12 Italian children with slow expressive development (late talkers; LT) were compared with those of 12…

The relation of social and linguistic input measures to early vocabulary development was examined in 30 low-income African American mother-infant pairs. Observations were conducted when the child was 0 years, 1 month (0;1), 0;4, 0;8, 1;0, 1;6, and 2;0. Maternal input was coded for word types and tokens, contingent responsiveness, and…

This study investigates the acquisition of the discourse/pragmatic notion of topic, based on an experimental task eliciting topic vs. focus subjects. In spoken French, these are obligatorily realized as dislocated vs. nondislocated noun phrases. The results provide overwhelming evidence for the early mastery of topic, even by the youngest children…

We report on a study investigating 3-5-year-old children's use of gesture to resolve lexical ambiguity. Children were told three short stories that contained two homonym senses; for example, "bat" (flying mammal) and "bat" (sports equipment). They were then asked to re-tell these stories to a second experimenter. The data were coded for the means…

Early prosodic development (f[subscript 0] variation) was systematically measured in Mandarin-learning infants at the transition from babbling to producing first words. Spontaneous vocalizations of twenty-four infants aged 0;7 to 1;6 were recorded in 45-minute sessions. The speech production of twenty-four caregivers was also audio-recorded during…

Recent work on the acquisition of number words has emphasized the importance of integrating linguistic and developmental perspectives [Musolino, J. (2004). The semantics and acquisition of number words: Integrating linguistic and developmental perspectives. "Cognition 93", 1-41; Papafragou, A., Musolino, J. (2003). Scalar implicatures: Scalar…

This study investigates associative learning explanations of the limited attainment of adult compared to child language acquisition in terms of learned attention to cues. It replicates and extends Ellis and Sagarra (2010) in demonstrating short- and long-term learned attention in the acquisition of temporal reference in Latin. In Experiment 1,…

Teaching sign language--to deaf or other children with special needs or to hearing children with hard-of-hearing family members--is not new. Teaching sign language to typically developing children has become increasingly popular since the publication of "Baby Signs"[R] (Goodwyn & Acredolo, 1996), now in its third edition. Attention to signing with…

This paper reports the results of a longitudinal case study examining the acquisition of the English voice system by a three-year-old native speaker of Dutch. The study aims to examine whether the child develops two different phonetic systems or uses just one system for both languages, and compares the early L2 acquisition process with L1,…

A longitudinal study was conducted to examine variations in caregiver input and infant attention in association with children's later lexical and syntactic skills. Fifteen infant-caregiver dyads were videotaped during naturalistic interactions when infants were 9 and 12 months old. Videotapes were coded for caregiver style and modality, and infant…