Investigated simple, appearance-predicted, and reality-predicted labelling in 36 3-, 4-, and 5-year olds. An age-related appearance-reality shift was observed in simple labelling. It is argued that younger children maintained the one-label-per-predicate pattern because of inflexible encoding; older children did so because of better understanding…

Examines cognitive development in 141 children (ages 5 to 8) and the use of pragmatic cues for anaphora resolution performed in verbal and puppet tasks with biased and neutral sentences. Violations of pragmatic constraint decreased with age and task, consistent with the perspective-shift model. Parallel function effects in neutral sentences were…

Studied the relationship between parents' correcting of childrens' sentences and children's subsequent grammaticality. Found that parent's language corrections are related to children's subsequent grammaticality but that recasts of incorrect sentences serve as negative leading indicators of grammaticality. Also shows that correction and negative…

Examines the ability of monolingual English-speaking subjects to judge whether two spoken samples are from the same or different unknown foreign language. Performance of subjects was only a small degree above chance, while at the same time giving reliable information about recognition and identification skills. Further studies are needed. (16…

Picture naming in children was assessed as a function of two stimulus characteristics: the number of correct names for a picture and the degree to which a picture realistically represents the object. Two experiments showed that children named low-uncertainty objects faster than high-uncertainty objects with multiple correct names. Contains 50…

The effects of intonation morphemes on the processing of simple reversible sentences containing a dislocated element were studied using synthetic speech stimuli. Both child and adult subjects processed the sentences better when they retained standard subject-verb-object order, suggesting that the morphemes serve as processing instructions.…

Examines, through a longitudinal study, the temporal correspondences of 4 Japanese children, aged 7 to 11, in the attainment of specific milestones in play and language. All children proceeded through the same sequence of stages, but the rate of development was different depending on their environment. (34 references) (GLR)

Twenty-eight toddlers with slow expressive language development were compared to normally speaking age-mates and found to show delayed rather than deviant development in the average level of complexity of their syllable structures, the number of different consonant phonemes produced, and the percentage of consonants correctly produced in…

This paper investigates the development of interactive communication skills in 170 children aged 7 to 13. Results indicate that the development of interactive communication skills is rather different from the process of language acquisition both in the extended timescale involved and in the considerable variability exhibited by speakers of…

Examines the role of grammatical prerequisites in code switching in young bilingual children. Grammatical constraints are not violated in the earliest uses of mixing. Code switching occurs early in life within these constraints when a certain kind of grammatical knowledge is accessible and functional categories are implemented in the child's…

Addresses recent advances in research and theory that relate to language shift in early childhood, cognitive, and academic consequences of bilingualism and second-language learning, and theoretical models for conceptualizing the development of bilingualism and second-language learning. Contains annotated bibliography. (47 references) (LET)

Results of a longitudinal case study of a monolingual Sesotho-speaking boy show that rule-assigned tone on subject markers is marked appropriately by age two. Underlying tonal representations on verb roots are learned gradually over time, showing an early Default High tone pattern. (Contains 51 references.) (Author)

Reprints a talk presented to teacher trainers in 1990 that surveys thinking on language acquisition, specifically on the transition from orality to literacy, focusing on Montessori connections and applications. (HTH)

A study of subject-verb agreement in 3-year-old speakers of Brazilian Portuguese found an overall low error rate, but with important contrasts in both frequency of production of different verb inflections and rate of agreement errors associated with them, suggesting subject-verb agreement is acquired piecemeal and the learning of particular verb…

A study investigated the extent to which the nature of verb input accounts for the order in which children acquire verbs. Subjects were 57 mothers and their Stage I children. Results suggest that the effect of syntactic diversity in input supports the "syntactic bootstrapping" account of how children use structural information to learn new verbs'…