Describes the Human Communication Research Centre Dialogue Database. The database consists of over 700 transcribed and coded dialogues from pairs of speakers aged from 7-14. The speakers are recorded over 2 years while tackling cooperative problem-solving tasks, and the same pairs of speakers are recorded over 2 years tackling 10 different…

How young children portray themselves in relation to others was examined in naturally occurring stories of personal experience told jointly with family members. The study of 2.5- to 5-year-old culturally diverse children supported developmental theorists' claims about the relational nature of self-development when connected discourse is taken as…

Summarizes a case study of the bilingual development (Italian/English) of a child in Australia. Data consist of recordings of her natural interactions from 18 months to her fourth birthday. The study focuses on how Christina learns the strategies of everyday interaction in the two languages. This is the first study to use the Systemic Functional…

Two studies investigated two and four to five year olds' conversations to determine whether discussions about preferences differ from discussions about emotions and whether developmental differences exist in descriptions of affect. Found that children were more likely to discuss causes and consequences for emotions than for preferences. (MM)

Reviews research on quantitative and qualitative indexes of play, and relationships between play and language. Finds consistent relationships between duration and level of play throughout early development, and parallel developments in play and language. Indicates that measures of spontaneous activity and habituation in infancy predict…

Preschoolers' performance on two tasks demonstrated that, given a perceptually available set of dolls, they were able to use number words to determine the quantity of a hidden or nonexistent set of items that was in a known ratio to the available set. (MM)

Analyzes children's verbal disputes for the development of discourse markers "because,""so,""and,""but," and "well." Shows that the markers were primarily used to mark the exchange structure of discourse when they were first used by children two years seven months to three years six months and that the first markers to do so were "but" and…

Investigates whether the underspecification of Number, which has been proposed to account for the structural properties of child grammars, can provide an explanation for changes in developing first- and second-language Spanish grammars. (Author/VWL)

Investigated the acquisition of verb placement by bilingual young children learning both German and English. Researchers recorded their speech monthly for three years and analyzed word order in the verb phrase. The children were actively involved in the process of determining structure in each language. Development of language output did not…

Using an events-history approach with 40 child-mother dyads, researchers examined prediction from three indexes of children's language, starting at 0;9, and mothers' verbal responsiveness at 0;9 and 1;1, investigating development of language milestones in year 2. Together, children's initial propensities to speak and mothers' responsiveness at the…

To investigate the apparent delay in color naming by young children, this study compared natural-kind and color naming (and corresponding comprehension) by 48 young English children who completed testing four times over six weeks. Results indicated that, as opposed to the salience view, the apparent delay in color naming may be explained solely on…

Analyzed vocalizations/verbalizations from children acquiring English or French in later single-word period to identify trochaic bias. Found that neither language's vocalizations were exclusively trochaic. French/English differences in iambic productions and acoustic realization of accent were traceable to adult input. Distribution of trochaic and…

A methodological study of 33 2-year-olds shows that child speech occurs at about the same level in different settings (the familiar home vs. the unfamiliar laboratory), but that children speak more and in more differentiated ways with different people (mother vs. stranger). (Author/VWL)

Presents data showing that the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory's (CDI) large variability, lack of stability, and insufficient ability to predict early language delay are authentic reflections of individual differences in early language development rather than measurement deficiencies. Responds to critiques regarding sociodemographic…

Marcus (1995) suggests that the rate of overregularization of English irregular plural nouns is not substantively different from that of English irregular past tense verbs. A response to this claim reviews longitudinal parental report data, which indicates that children are significantly more likely to produce noun overregularizations than verb…