Reanalyzes what the literature has taken to be children's productions of Gen subjects and argues that Gen subjects do not exist in child English. Suggests that what look like Gen subjects appear only in specific discourse contexts: contexts of contrastive focus or contexts of emphatic focus. (Author/VWL)

Examined young children's acquisition of wh-questions. Children heard a wh-question and attempted to repeat it; a "talking bear" answered. The same format was used for two intervention sessions for children in a quasicontrol condition. Suggests very little input--if concentrated and varied and presented so the child attends to it and…

Sixteen children, aged 7:8 to 9:10, learned 2 miniature languages differing in word order. Children found the Subject-Object-Verb language easier than the Verb-Subject-Object language; they also made more suffix errors and fewer word order errors in the Subject-Object-Verb language. (Author/DB)

Describes the CHILDES/BIB electronic bibliographic database, its contents, and its relationship to the CHILDES database. CHILDES is a depository of child language corpora and is the publisher of CHAT (a transcription manual) and CLAN (an electronic package for child language research). (GLR)

Study of how the verbal component of "babytalk" affected three-month-olds' (N=40) vocal qualities suggested that conversational turn-taking facilitated a speak-listen pattern of infant vocalizations and indicated that what adults "say" to infants influences what infants "say" in response. (Author/CB)

Investigation into the relative effectiveness of four input strategies for two-year-olds' (N=56) category evolution found that the most effective strategy involved labelling an object and providing both a physical demonstration and a verbal description of important attributes. (Author/CB)

This article compares children's productions of wh-questions such as "who?" or "what?". Data were gathered using the technique of elicited production. (26 references) (JL)

Relative importance of appearance and potential function in children's object naming was examined. First, 16 children, taught novel names for unfamiliar objects, had to decide whether these applied to items that resembled the training objects in appearance or potential function. Then the name training procedure was revised so that equal emphasis…

Two studies of the unintelligible speech of developmentally delayed children found that more intelligible child speech was found in routine than in nonroutine situations and that extracted utterances were more intelligible under context-information-present conditions. (35 references) (Author/CB)

Presents four principles for archive-based language research: maximum readability and minimum bias; consistent encoding for exhaustive computer search; systematic contrastiveness; and data comparability in elicitation, transcription and coding. Examples from existing computer archives illustrate these and other principles, and strategies are…

Interaction between lexical acquisition and acquisition of initial voiceless stops (VSs) was studied in two normally developing children by acoustically examining token-by-token accuracy of initial VS targets in different lexical items. Tokens representing the emergence of accurate VS production were restricted to certain words, largely old words…

Tested the prediction that "yes-no" questions that place forms of the copula "be" in initial position will also increase the rate of growth of children's copula verb development. Data from 33 children who were matched for stage of language development at 1;9 and 2;0 confirm that the frequency of inverted copulas in yes-no…

Different interactions of two common phenomena--final consonant omission and vowel lengthening before voiced consonants--are examined with a focus on a case study of two young children with phonological delays in their acquisition of English. Argues that at least some developmental opacity effects support sympathy and that such effects emerge in…

Examined use of word order and animacy for interpretation of sentences by typically-developing and language delayed children. Results indicate that typically-developing 2-year-olds use neither cue consistently to interpret sentences; typically-developing 2.5-year-olds used a coalition of word order and animacy cues; and language-delayed…

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…