Vocabulary development of a sample of 42 Italian children was evaluated through monthly administration of the Italian version of the CDI. Data collection started at age one for 32 children and a few moths later for the remaining subjects and continued until children's vocabulary reached 200 words. At fixed stages of vocabulary size, individual…

An adapted version of the Puppet Interview was used to examine the self-concept of 6-year-old kindergartners. Responses showed that the fundamental structures identified by L'Ecuyer (1994) were present except the Self-Nonself. The adaptive self and personal self were central structures. Three substructures (self-image, social attitudes, and…

To understand the development of number-word construction, students in grades 1, 3, 5, and 7 named and counted from a set of numbers into the billions in two studies. Findings are discussed both in relation to children's growing knowledge of the number system and to vocabulary development. (Author)

Two common and seemingly independent error patterns, namely consonant harmony and gliding, are examined for their typological characteristics based on cross-sectional and longitudinal evidence from young children's developing phonologies. Data are drawn from the published literature and from the developmental phonology archives at Indiana…

Two experiments investigated the Aspect First Hypothesis, which claims children initially use verbal morphology to mark aspect and not tense. The first tested 46 2- and 3-year-old children's comprehension of tense as it is marked in the auxiliary system using a sentence-to-scene matching task. The second changed the information available in the…

Examines whether children make use of the conceptual link between animacy and agency when interpreting the verb "move" in English. Hypothesized that, for inanimates, children would allow "move" to have a patient subject but not so for inanimates. Subjects were 3- and 4-year-olds and adults who viewed video clips of animals or…

Responds to research claims by Marcus, Pinker, Ullman, Hollander, Rosen, and Xu (1992) that overregularizations are never frequent in children's speech. Shows evidence for overregularizations in three longitudinal subjects. (Author/VWL)

Discusses childhood bilingualism, reviewing the one person-one language principle and the criticism against it, discussing shortcomings of the criticism, examining what the principle can do to bilingual families, and noting the sociolinguistic and developmental effects that one person-one language principle can have on the acquisition of the…

Investigates a strategy for language acquisition adopted by one child and the usefulness of imitation in supporting that strategy. Examination of recordings made of naturally occurring conversations between the child and his parents indicated that he exploited imitation fully in order to acquire language. Imitative utterances surpassed spontaneous…

Many child language studies emphasize the value of verbal and social support, of 'scaffolding' processes and mutual adjustments that naturally occur in adult-child interactions in everyday contexts. Based on such theories, this study attempted to improve the language and communication skills in children with special educational needs through…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the unconditional and conditional relations between amount of intervention and language development in children with autism. Joint attention skills were proposed as child characteristics that might moderate this relation. The results replicated previous findings that better joint attention skills…

It is very important to determine if a bilingual child's language delay is simply in English or also in the child's native language. Understandably, many children have higher levels of language development in the language spoken at home. To discover if this is the case, observe the child talking with his parents. Sometimes, even without…

Two experiments investigated the factors that govern children's use of singular and plural forms of count nouns. Experiment 1 used an elicited production task to investigate whether children use referential and/or syntactic information to determine the form of the count nouns when the two sources of information conflict (e.g. "each x, one of the…

Data from one English-Italian bilingual child (1;10-3;1) are presented in this study which challenge the hypothesis that the consistent realization of overt subjects in English is caused by the emergence of finite verbal morphology in the child's grammar. The argument is made for the emergence of subjects as an independent grammatical property of…

Two nonce-word studies examined German-speaking children's productivity with the "Perfekt" (present perfect) from 2;6 to 3;6. The German "Perfekt" consists of the past participle of the main verb and an inflected form of an auxiliary (either "haben" "have" or "sein" "be"). In Study 1, nonce verbs were either introduced in the infinitival form, and…