Recent studies have shown that children as well as adults can detect mispronounced words presented in running speech contexts. Listeners' detections are influenced by both phonological and lexical characteristics of the mispronounced words. The present study compared the performance of normal-speaking children, misarticulating children, and adults on a task which required the detection of mispronounced words. Phonological shifts presented in the stimuli represented both developmental and nondevelopmental patterns. Analysis of errors in detecting these mispronunciations indicated that adults were significantly more accurate than either group of children. In contrast, the performance of the two groups of children was relatively similar. Both children and adults more readily detected mispronunciations patterned after developmental errors than those mispronunciations manifesting more unusual, nondevelopmental sound shifts. Individual mispronounced words varied widely in their detectability. Nevertheless, those words which children found most difficult were also those on which adults most often erred. Parallels observed between the performance of the misarticulating children and their normally developing peers indicate that both younger groups use linguistic knowledge in a similar way in the perception of others' fluent speech.

Illiterate, unschooled adults were tested on their notions of word length. Experiment 1 showed that only about half of them performed very poorly on a task requiring the production of a long/short word. They were clearly inferior to formerly illiterate, unschooled adults. The illiterate group also broke up neatly into two subgroups, one performing perfectly or very well, the other failing completely or almost completely, when required to match the written and the oral form of long/short words. Similarly, Experiment 2 showed that about half of the illiterates were unable to choose the longest of two names when presented with drawings of objects. The results suggest that learning to read, though not strictly necessary, plays a decisive role in the development of the ability of many individuals to focus on phonological length.

Specifically-language-impaired children and younger normal children matched for expressive language were presented with unfamiliar object names and referents across five experimental sessions. The objects differed in the degree to which they were associated with actions, and only certain of the object exemplars were named during presentation. Comprehension testing revealed that the specifically-language-impaired children acquired a greater number of object concepts presented in a no-action condition than the normal children. However, their extension of the names to new exemplars was more restricted and less differentiated. Several possible accounts of these findings are evaluated.

An experiment is reported in which university undergraduates were given word definitions and asked to say aloud all responses that came to mind in the course of their attempts to retrieve the target words. Results showed that phonologically similar responses and word-fragments are good predictors of target word knowledge and the likelihood of eventual success in retrieval. Responses which were semantically related to the target word were less predictive of eventual success. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for interpreting tip-of-the-tongue analyses as a “window” on the process of word retrieval.

Twelve infants were observed longitudinally to examine the relationship of children's object play and social behavior and maternal object and social-centered talk to referential and expressive language. Measures of child behavior and maternal language were coded from play sessions videotaped in the home at 12, 15, and 18 months of age; mothers recorded their babies' first 50 words. Most children acquired a balanced distribution of object labels and social-centered words and phrases; a few children evidenced a more extreme “style.” More object labels were acquired by children who more often used a toy to engage mother and who had mothers who more often talked about toys. More social-centered speech was associated with children's nontoy-mediated social attention and more maternal behavior-focused speech.

Analysis of data from the first six months of acquisition of English as a second language by a 5-year-old Japanese girl illustrates the role of modular “chunking” and coupling in the second language acquisition process. This process was apparent in the child's pre-copula and copula referential utterances. She produced a large number of creative and novel referential sentences by using a small number of patterns or modules. The same small set of patterns was seen in both adult and peer sessions, although advances in acquisition usually appeared in peer conversation before they were evident in adult session data.