Examined whether 7- to 9-year-olds vary their judgments of responsibility according to the reason that the promised action was not completed and recognize that an unfulfilled an promise is a promise regardless of whether the speaker's failure is unavoidable or intentional. (Author/VWL)

Provides evidence from child language acquisition and comparative syntax for existence of a syntactic parameter in the classical sense of Chomsky (1981), with simultaneous effects on syntactic argument structure. Implications are that syntax is subject to points of substantive parametric variation as envisioned in Chomsky, and the time course of…

This article introduces the topic of this special issue of the journal. Explains the separate worlds hypothesis, discusses feminist critiques of separate worlds, and introduces children's gender indexing and considerations of culture, context, and power. (Author/VWL)

Examined effects of animacy on production of different syntactic structures and word orders by Catalan-speaking children, and explored the relationship between age and the production of different syntactic structures by children. Results of a picture description task show that participants tended to produce more object-dislocated descriptions when…

Examined the evolution of visual perspective-taking skills in relation to comprehension and production of first, second, and third person pronouns among French and English speaking toddlers. Some perceptual perspective-taking capacities were well developed by the time children acquired a full mastery of personal pronouns. Full pronoun acquisition…

Examined the production of verbal justifications quantitatively and qualitatively in eight pairs of children whose natural discourse was videotaped, transcribed, and coded. Children produced most justifications both in the context of elaborating on a previously asserted claim and in conflicts. The statement justified and the justifications…

This article focuses on applying systematic reviews to the Early Intervention (EI) literature. Systematic reviews are defined and differentiated from traditional, or narrative, reviews and from meta-analyses. In addition, the steps involved in critiquing systematic reviews and an illustration of a systematic review from the EI literature are…

This retrospective, exploratory investigation examined the types of target words that 30 children with word-finding difficulties (aged 8 to 12 years) had difficulty naming and the types of errors they made on these words. Words were studied with reference to lexical factors that might influence naming performance: word frequency, age of…

Using a discourse analytic approach from the work of Hoey (1991) and a dual processing model from Wray (2000), this paper compares the language produced by the same classes of children when they are engaged in role-play and when they are playing rule-based games. We find that role-play tends to be richer in "frozen" pair parts, where the responses…

A central tenet of two-way immersion has been that the minority language children benefit from mother-tongue support in addition to instruction and interaction in the majority language (usually English) with their peers in high prestige programmes, while the English speakers gain valuable opportunities for peer interaction in their L2 with native…

In this squib we examine the time course of children's acquisition of English to evaluate the basic insights of Kayne's (1981; 1984) proposals on preposition stranding. Kayne argued that the availability of preposition stranding (P-stranding) in English is parametrically linked to the availability of double object datives and the prepositional…

A comparison of the error profiles of monolingual (child L1) learners of Dutch, Moroccan children (child L2) and Moroccan adults (adult L2) learning Dutch as their L2 shows that participants in all groups massively overgeneralize [-neuter] articles to [+neuter] contexts. In all groups, the reverse gender mistake infrequently occurs. Gender…

Previous studies show that young monolingual children's ability to "fast map" new word forms is closely associated with both their age and existing vocabulary knowledge. In this study we investigate potential relationships between age, fast mapping skills and existing vocabulary knowledge in both languages of developing bilingual preschool…

Comments on some of the persistent problems that are encountered in the study of the transition from prespeech communication to early language. Topics are: 1) inference of communicative intent, 2) nature of early reference, 3) use of language in the regulation of joint action, and 4) the precursors of predication. (RC)

This bibliography is designed to introduce the reader to the main works in normal (nondeviant) child phonology available in English. It includes two general readers on child language and 27 books and articles with primary emphasis on phonology. (SW)