Analysis of natural speech from 6-year-old (n=10) and 10-year-old (n=10) children suggests that, during later language development, the complexity of structures at the group/phrase level increases. There are also developments in discourse, including increased sensitivity to the role of topic-selection in developing the shape of a text, and to…

Examined children's language acquisition by compiling a record of one English boy's utterances from age four to six. The record revealed the boy's interest in the meaning of words, knowledge of grammar, interest in non-English words, explorations of the connections between what people say and what they mean, and understanding of the role of…

Reviews book on the current state of psychological semantics for researchers in language development. Notes points of agreement among contributors, including: study of semantics has been too oriented toward substance nouns; assigning novel words to real objects or events is more difficult using verbs than nouns; and syntax is more integrally…

Proposes that a mute verbal modeling system gets lodged in the brain, because the brain is human and modeling, representing, and communicating create connections in the brain. (Author/VWL)

Investigated young children's ability to talk about representational aspects of pretense. Found that 5-year-olds, but very few 4-year-olds, can explain why certain actions should not be called pretending; young children discriminate between pictures of thinking and pretending based on a depiction of action; and preschoolers are less able than…

Discusses the right of Deaf children to grow up bilingually. This involves the opportunity to acquire a sign language as well as the oral language spoken by the hearing community. Examines the role of both the sign language and the oral language for the Deaf child. (Author/VWL)

The appearance of filler syllables in the late-word period is analyzed in relation to the emergence of grammatical morphemes, by confronting data from the longitudinal study of one child acquiring French, with four hypotheses making different claims about the kind of language knowledge underlying their production. (Author/VWL)

Examines pragmatic factors that bias English-speaking children to produce more of the nouns and fewer of the verbs than they know. Data from 44 parent-child dyads in the New England directory of the CHILDES data base were analyzed. (Author/VWL)

Ten 4-year-old children imitated short sentences with falling and rising tones in four intonation groups. Results indicated that children used more falling tones than adults in most intonation groups, suggesting that rising tones may be more difficult for young children to produce than falling tones. (DB)

Presents the results of an empirical study of the interpretation of left branch "combien" (how many) extractions in English-French interlanguage. Results show that knowledge of the interpretation of left-branch "combien" extraction is detectable in English-French interlanguage. (Author/VWL)

This study of rapid picture naming by 20 normally developing children (mean age 11 years) found significant differences between two-and three-dimensional pictures for higher level vocabulary items, but not for lower-level vocabulary items, suggesting that dimensionality may be a critical feature for rapid lexical access for higher-level picture…

This study evaluated recorded performances of 84 children of whom 22 had persistent stuttering. Although initially the persistent stuttering group had significantly poorer phonological skills, assessment after 1 and 2 years found no differences indicating faster phonological improvement for the persistent stuttering group. Results raise questions…

This study compared judgments of idiom familiarity and transparency by 50 11-year-old children and 50 16-year-old adolescents. Although the children had less familiarity and greater difficulty comprehending the idioms than did adolescents, their transparency judgments were similar. For both groups the easiest idioms were also judged as the most…

Investigated the development of syntactic awareness in Cantonese-speaking children. Fifty-six subjects from four age groups were asked to judge the grammaticality of 40 sentences and to correct the grammatically-deviant sentences. There was a significant age effect on subject's performance in both judgment and revision tasks. (Author/VWL)

Discusses first- and second-language word order acquisition. A version of the OV/VO parameter is developed that is not construction specific. It relates various empirical domains, including basic word order, scrambling, exceptional case marking, and the distribution of particles. (Author/JL)