Describes an ethnographic study of African American toddlers and families that focused on children's productive competence in naturally occurring narrativelike conversation. Examines emergence of narrative competence; posits definition incorporating minimal requirements for child participation within the fundamental essence of narrative structure.…

Examined two-year-olds' word learning. In one study, adults modeled the new word for an object novel to the children; in another, the object was novel only for the adult. Subjects displayed significant learning of new words in both settings, suggesting that toddlers understand that novelty in a discourse setting is determined from the speaker's…

Responds to a previous article on emergentism, connectionism, and language learning. Suggests that connectionist models of emergent language knowledge will continue to be important in the years to come. (Author/JL)

Investigates how the noun and verb classes develop in the free speech of a French child between the ages of 1 year, 2 months to 2 years and 6 months from the perspective of semantic and grammatical development. Analyses indicate that in French acquisition, nouns clearly predominate over verbs until 20 months of age at least, but that verbs are…

Investigated whether infants can construe the same set of objects as an object category or as embodying an object property. Results of 2 experiments involving 48 and 64 14-month-olds respectively suggest that infants have begun to distinguish nouns from adjectives, they expect different grammatical forms to highlight different aspects, and that…

Reports elicited production and grammaticality judgment data from three experiments on the status of resumptive pronouns in English. Participants were children and adults. Examined children's acquisition of syntax in light of development of linguistic processing systems. (Author/VWL)

Two experiments investigated why preschool children sometimes produce multiple words of a referent, but other times allow only on word. In the first experiment, 3- and 4-year-old children completed a naming task. Children produced on average more than two words per object. In the second, 3- and 4-year-olds learned new words for nameable objects.…

Notes the variability in child speech and language development. Explores the debate over whether and when to intervene with children whose speech is developing later than the norm. (HTH)

Examined input frequency, sentence position, and duration as contributing factors to grammatical inflections. In parents' conversations with and stories aimed at young children, noun plural inflections were more frequent than third singular verb inflections, especially in sentence-final position. Analysis of four mothers' speech when reading…

Investigated young children's learning of the correct use of first and second person pronouns, using feed-forward neural networks. The study involved four computer simulations using the cascade-correlation (CC) learning algorithm. Results indicated that the CC networks could produce the correct pronouns without errors if children heard pronouns…

Investigated young blind children's use of pronouns, following blind and sighted children longitudinally and analyzing every spatial deictic term and personal reference term they used (noting reversal errors). Results indicated that blind children began to use personal reference terms as early as sighted children, and use of reversals was not…

Investigated the use of orthographic and phonologic information in reading Chinese text using an eye-monitoring technique. Results support the position that it is orthography rather than phonology that plays an early and dominant role in reading Chinese. (Author/VWL)

Critiques an article about social factors in Piaget's conceptualization of intellectual development, which ignored the integral role that language played in Piaget's writings on intellectual development. Questions the appropriateness of discarding these linguistic elements and notes that the article did not show how Piaget's early ideas on the…

Two studies investigated the syntactic bootstrapping abilities of 5- and 7-year-old children with specific language impairment and comparison groups matched for equivalent language level or chronological age. Only typically developing 5-year-olds showed evidence of using syntactic clues. However, continued syntactic growth was seen in all…

This study compared the morphosyntax of French speaking children with specific language impairment to the morphosyntax of English speaking children acquiring a second language (French). Findings indicated that use of morphosyntax by both groups has significant similarities and children in both groups demonstrated optional infinitive effects in…