Reanalyzes what the literature has taken to be children's productions of Gen subjects and argues that Gen subjects do not exist in child English. Suggests that what look like Gen subjects appear only in specific discourse contexts: contexts of contrastive focus or contexts of emphatic focus. (Author/VWL)

Two experiments with monolingual German-speaking 2.5- to 4.5-year-olds showed a consistent developmental gap between children's memory/inference of what someone wanted and what someone wrongly said or thought. Correct answers emerged with mastery of the false-belief task. It was concluded that the observed gap constrains de Villiers's linguistic…

Examined young children's acquisition of wh-questions. Children heard a wh-question and attempted to repeat it; a "talking bear" answered. The same format was used for two intervention sessions for children in a quasicontrol condition. Suggests very little input--if concentrated and varied and presented so the child attends to it and…

Data from three children learning Spanish are explored for the development of linguistic person in an inflectional language. Contrastive use of person, tense, and number and the presence of overt subjects and overt objects are examined. (Author/VWL)

This article presents a matrix model to train individuals with severe handicaps to use language skills in spontaneous language situations. The model takes into account listener preparatory behaviors and contextual variables. The model suggests procedures for efficient training for generalization. (DB)

The stressing patterns of five preschool language-impaired children were investigated. Analysis of two-word utterances in language samples found that three subjects tended to stress words based on their position in the utterance; one child stressed words based on informativeness; and one of the subjects' preferences was unclear. (JDD)

Sixteen children, aged 7:8 to 9:10, learned 2 miniature languages differing in word order. Children found the Subject-Object-Verb language easier than the Verb-Subject-Object language; they also made more suffix errors and fewer word order errors in the Subject-Object-Verb language. (Author/DB)

Shares the literacy development of the author's son. Shows how the child used language for the following functions: instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal, heuristic, imaginative, and representational. (MG)

The phonological systems of 40 functional misarticulators, ages 40-80 months, were examined in terms of the nature and variation of phonetic inventories and phonotactic constraints. Evidence suggests that these properties of disordered systems represent delays in the normal acquisition process and are not otherwise deviant. (Author/JDD)

Relates language acquisition theories regarding comprehension, early speech, and speech emergence within the Natural Approach, which returns language learning to the living context and maintains the isolated fragments of language as a whole, to those theories expressed in a comparison between the experience of an apprentice singer of tales to that…

Investigated the ability of six children at ages 24, 26, 28, 30, 33, and 36 months to understand the topic of talk not addressed to them. Analyzed children's intrusions into conversations between their mothers and older siblings. Results indicated that intrusions formed a considerable proportion of children's talk. (RJC)

Study of how the verbal component of "babytalk" affected three-month-olds' (N=40) vocal qualities suggested that conversational turn-taking facilitated a speak-listen pattern of infant vocalizations and indicated that what adults "say" to infants influences what infants "say" in response. (Author/CB)

Investigation into the relative effectiveness of four input strategies for two-year-olds' (N=56) category evolution found that the most effective strategy involved labelling an object and providing both a physical demonstration and a verbal description of important attributes. (Author/CB)

Four experiments which involved 160 children aged 2 to 19 investigate the mutual exclusivity bias in children's word learning. Results indicate that the bias develops after the second birthday but does not gain full strength or become accessible to consciousness until after the third birthday. (RJC)

Argues that a loss in general literacy occurs as the potential for imagery decreases through lack of understanding of the root meanings of words. Argues that the rich stores of imagery that contribute to English vocabulary are denied to those ignorant of the linguistic contributions to the English language. (RS)