Examined children's generalization of familiar verbs to novel events. Findings reveal children aged 1;8 with the largest expressive vocabulary generalized the same verbs to actions with different agents, but not to actions different in outcome or manner of action and children aged 2;2 extended familiar action verbs to other actions different in…

Examines the contributions made by stakeholders such has learners, teachers, and parents to the language assessment process. Examines the relationship between experts and government in the United Kingdom. It is argued that participation by stakeholders is not limited to providing a forum but includes equipping teachers, parents, and others with…

Maternal ostensive naming was investigated in a cross-sectional study of 12 children. Display, demonstration, and pointing were coded with regard to whether and how coexisting speech referred to gesture focus. Maternal input was found to be significantly correlated with children's reported receptive vocabulary. (Author/JL)

Reviews data on the acquisition of German without formal instruction by native speakers of Korean, Turkish, Italian, and German, on the acquisition of French by English speakers, and of the acquisition of English by speakers of various first languages (L1). Evidence indicates that the sole projections that the learner transfers from the L1 are…

Discusses the results of presenting an animated movie conveying the theme of preserving the natural environment to non-English-speaking Mexican children in English-as-a-Second-Language classes as a stimulus for concentrating on English comprehension. Findings indicate that 42% of the students reviewed showed English comprehension and 30% described…

Discusses that Serbo-Croation is a language with a dual system of relative clause formation and describes elicited production and comprehension experiments conducted with preschool children. Results are discussed in the context of the cross-linguistic typology of relative clauses and previous studies of the acquisition of relative clauses. (27…

Presents an approach to face-to-face interaction grammar that aims to discover rules of interaction that interlocutors share and suggests that this approach is common to conversational analysis and context analysis. Case studies are presented of interaction structure in parent-child routines during the child's first year. (58 references) (CK)

Discusses the importance of including bilingual English/Spanish picture books in library collections, introduces some recent titles, and describes some programming ideas. Topics include second language study, children teaching English to Spanish-speaking parents, cultural studies, and bilingual presentations. (LRW)

Explored effects of interactional feedback on children's second language (L2) development in a prettest/posttest design. Child learners carried out communicative tasks that provided contexts for targeted forms and interactional feedback to occur. An experimental group received interactional feedback in response to non-targetlike production of…

Examined miscommunication episodes occurring between 2.5-year-olds and their parents during videotaped free play sessions. Although children generally responded appropriately in form to parental clarification requests, they responded more often to and resolved successfully more of those following their own requests than those following their…

Observation of severely to profoundly deaf four- to nine-year-olds (N=24) producing three types of multi-morphemic classifier predicates in American Sign Language showed that handshape production was influenced both by morphological and syntactic complexity, while handshape errors were not based on anatomical complexity alone. (26 references)…

Assesses verb phrase development in three Trinidadian children in which Standard English and Trinidad Creole coexist. Adverbials were found to be crucial in delineating specific areas of semantic intent. (20 references) (GLR)

Compares the prosodic modifications in mothers' and fathers' speech to preverbal infants in American and British English, French, German, Japanese, and Italian. Speech samples were instrumentally analyzed to measure mean fundamental frequency, variability, utterance, duration, and pause duration. (67 references) (Author/CB)

Reports on longitudinal data from a group of three- to six-year-olds (N=64) that supports a hypothesis that acquaintance with nursery rhymes positively affects children's reading ability. Data showed a strong relation between early knowledge of nursery rhymes and success in reading and spelling, despite differences in social background,…

Examined the use by children of the Novel Name-Nameless Category principle, under the framework that lexical principles are acquired in a developmental sequence. Results indicated that the particular principle was not available at the start of lexical acquisition but that exhaustive categorization ability and a vocabulary spurt occur…