Possible developmental asynchrony in children with specific language impairment (SLI) was investigated by comparing the development of temporal expressions of past reference in two linguistic domains in three- to five-year-olds. Results of the SLI children's performance suggest direct evidence for asynchronous language development. (Contains 40…

Study of 3 and 7 year olds and adults examined role that changes in continuity, direction, instrument, and causative agent play in children's and adults' initial assumptions about meaning of novel motion verbs and events. Subjects made similar initial assumptions, but children generalized more conservatively than adults to all change types in…

Seventeen toddlers with specific expressive language delay were compared to two control groups on measures of spontaneous and imitated gesture production. Late talkers performed like age/comprehension-matched controls on gesture production and later appearing symbolic gestures and performed like language-matched controls on earlier appearing…

Asserts that several of the assumptions underlying Noam Chomsky's and W. V. O. Quine's theories of language acquisition and development are misleading or false. It is argued, among other things, that children do not "acquire" language, but rather learn how to participate in the linguistic community surrounding them. (99 references) (MDM)

Examines Krashen's (1977) theory that postulates a distinction between language acquisition and language learning, reviewing recent studies on morpheme order, code-focused instruction, and grammatical rules that support the theory. Contrary to what has been claimed, the theory is not insulated against attempts to disconfirm it. (87 references)…

Twenty-five preschool children with specific language impairment and 25 controls were evaluated on generalization of trained bound morphemes to untrained vocabulary stems, in 2 training conditions: explicit, trainer verbalization of the affixation "rule" and an "implicit rule" condition. Findings indicated that explicit presentation of…

Evaluation of the validity of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Sentences with 44 children with Down syndrome and 48 typically developing children established the validity of this parental measure of vocabulary development for children with Down syndrome and confirmed its validity for typically developing children.…

This study investigated the rate at which 60 elementary school children produced 3 advanced verb forms--past progressive, past perfect progressive, and past perfect--when retelling narratives. Results suggest that advanced verb production is influenced by children's sensitivity to type of narrative register, the propositional ability associated…

This study examined a seven-year-old deaf child's pragmatic language development within the context of her life in a hearing family. Observations, videotaping, and interviews provided descriptive data. Analysis showed that deafness impacted on the family's beliefs and communication practices and that the child was a competent communicator who…

Acquisition of the novel name-nameless category (N3C) principle by 22 toddlers with Down syndrome was studied. Results indicated that the ability to fast map a new word to a category is not available at the start of lexical acquisition. Children who used the N3C principle had larger productive vocabularies than others and had begun to acquire new…

A study with three- and five-year olds contrasted two important proposals regarding children's assumptions about word meanings: the taxonomic assumption proposal and the shape bias proposal. Results suggest that perceptual similarity, particularly shape similarity, is very important in early word meaning but that children gradually shift their…

Children ages five, seven, and nine years named objects with multiple names in a neutral context and in a biased context. Children selected names in accord with nonlinguistic constraints, but at the cost of longer naming times. Both name selection success and associated cost were more evident in older children than in younger children. (TJQ)

This article introduces four papers (EC 612 460-EC 612 463) that were developed from two miniseminars presented at the 1992 and 1993 annual conventions of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. The miniseminars addressed the topic of establishing language norms for school-age children and adolescents. (DB)

Examined the development of grammatical morphemes, such as determiners, complementizers, and inflections, in the grammar of one child with specific language impairment four times between ages three and six. Results were consistent with an interpretation of a slowly developing grammar with elements from functional categories especially late in…

John Schumann and colleagues have argued for a neurobiological perspective on language acquisition that denies a role for a specifically linguistic mental module of the sort proposed by, for example, N. Chomsky (1986). This report challenges this perspective by offering evidence that such a mental module must be involved in the acquisition of…