The present study examined the composition of the early productive vocabulary of eight Korean- and eight English-learning children and the morpho-syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics of their caregivers' input in order to determine parallels between caregiver input and early lexical development. Vocabulary acquisition was followed using maternal diary and checklists for the Korean-learning children (from a mean age of 1;6 to 1;9) and for the English-learning children (from a mean age of 1;4 to 1;8). Results showed that both Korean- learning and English-learning children acquired significantly more nouns than verbs at the 50-word mark. However, Korean children learned significantly more verbs than did English-learning children. The relative ease with which Korean learners, as compared to English learners, acquired verbs parallels several differences in the linguistic and socio-pragmatic characteristics of the input addressed to them. Korean- speaking caregivers presented more activity-oriented utterances, more verbs, and more salient cues to verbs than did English-speaking caregivers. These data suggest that both general and language-specific factors shape the early lexicon.

This study assessed the long-term predictive validity of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories: Words and Sentences (CDI[ratio ]WS; Fenson, Dale, Reznick, Thal, Bates, Hartung, Pethick & Reilly, 1993) for children's expressive and receptive vocabulary development. Sixty-one New Zealand children (31 females) were assessed with a New Zealand version of the CDI[ratio ]WS at 1;7 and 2;1 and with the Expressive Vocabulary Test (Williams, 1997) and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-III (Dunn & Dunn, 1997) at 2;8 and 3;4. Excellent reliability and good predictive validity was obtained for the NZ CDI[ratio ]WS even over a 21-month delay. Predictive validity of the NZ CDI[ratio ]WS for the PPVT-III was higher for children of mothers with less education. We discuss the implications of these results for use of the CDI[ratio ]WS with children from a broad range of cultural and educational backgrounds.

Early morphosyntax is very rich and uniform in young French-speaking children. The present study aims to give a thorough analysis of the morphosyntax produced at the outset of multi-word speech, with a classification of free language produced at 2;0 by 27 French-speaking children. The corpus was fully tagged by an automatic part-of-speech tagger. A classification performed with words taken in isolation shows a clear difference between the categories used in single-word utterances and those used in multi-word utterances. A classification performed with word sequences reveals surprisingly adult-like sequences of syntactic categories and words; the non-adult combinations are few in a French child's language. The very successful use of the tagger demonstrates the morphosyntactic coherence of the child's speech. When compared with adult language, the quantitative results, and more precisely the data concerning regularity and error types, contribute to the documentation of all the specificities of the emerging morphosyntax in normally developing French children.

Vocabulary growth from 2;0 to 3;0 was studied in 28 late talkers using expressive vocabulary inventories reported bimonthly on the Language Development Survey (LDS). Group milestones were 18 words at 2;0, 89 words at 2;6, and 195 words at 3;0. A sub-group of 11 children (Group 1) showed a rapid vocabulary spurt between 2;2 and 2;8, reached the 150–180 word mark by 2;6, and attained the LDS ceiling of about 300 words by 2;10. In contrast, the 17 children in Group 2 still had a mean vocabulary of fewer than 30 words at 2;6, had less of a vocabulary spurt when they did start acquiring words, and attained the 150–180 vocabulary mark at 3;0. All 3;0 language outcome measures were significantly predicted by LDS vocabulary size from 2;2 to 2;4.

The aim of the present study is to investigate the relationship between language comprehension and language production in Swedish children. This was done longitudinally with 10 children with specific language impairment (SLI), aged 4;0 to 6;3 at Time I, and 10 children with unimpaired language development, aged 3;1 to 3;7 at Time I. The target structure was subordination, more precisely relative clauses. The children's comprehension was tested with picture pointing, act-out and oral response tests. Their production was tested with elicited imitation and sentence completion tests. Data were collected twice, with an interval of six months. The results from the unimpaired children at Time I showed a difference between comprehension and production. At Time II these children scored higher on production than on comprehension. The children with SLI scored significantly higher on comprehension than on production at Time I. In half of the SLI group there was a clear development between the two data collection sessions, diminishing the dissociation. On neither testing did the children with SLI differ significantly from the unimpaired children in comprehension. At both testings, however, the children with SLI had significantly more responses where they did not insert the complementizer in relative clauses. The results indicate that the relationship between comprehension and production is different at different stages in development. They also show that structures involving dependency relations are particularly difficult to produce for children with SLI.

Two experiments examined phonological priming in children and adults, using a cross-modal picture-word interference task. Pictures of familiar objects were presented on a computer screen, while interfering words (IWs) were presented over headphones. In terms of their relation to target pictures, IWs were either phonologically related, unrelated, neutral (the word go), or identical. Ninety children (30 aged 4;11 to 5;11, 30 aged 6;11 to 7;11, and 30 aged 9;5 to 11;9) and 30 adults were instructed to name the pictures as quickly as possible while ignoring the IWs. In Experiment 1, related IWs shared onset consonants with the names of the pictures. Across ages, participants named pictures faster with related IWs than with unrelated IWs. In Experiment 2, related IWs rhymed with the targets. Here, only the youngest children (five to seven-year-olds) named pictures faster with related IWs than with unrelated IWs. The results indicate that priming effects reach a peak during a time when articulatory information is being consolidated in the output phonological buffer. The disappearance of the rhyme priming effect with age may reflect the gradual emergence of the onset as an organizing structure in speech production. This increased prominence of the onset can be viewed as one component of a just-in-time, incrementalist approach to speech production that allows adults to speak more fluently than children.

The aim of this study was to explain why children have difficulty with homonymy. Two experiments were conducted with forty-eight children (Experiment 1) and twenty-four children (Experiment 2). Three- and four-year-old children had to either select or judge another person's selection of a different object with the same name, avoiding identical objects and misnomers. Older children were successful, but despite possessing the necessary vocabulary, younger children failed these tasks. Understanding of homonymy was strongly and significantly associated to understanding of synonymy, and more importantly, understanding of false belief, even when verbal mental age, chronological age, and control measures were partialled out. This indicates that children's ability to understand homonymy results from their ability to make a distinction characteristic of representation, a distinction fundamental to both metalinguistic awareness and theory of mind.

A mother's ability to identify consistently what she perceives to be communicatively salient behaviours is considered to be fundamental to the process of responding sensitively to prelinguistic infants. The present study investigated the ability of 35 mothers to identify consistently what they perceived to be communicative acts by infants at three ages (0;6, 0;9, and 1;0). Each mother coded the same videotape of her infant's behaviour on two occasions, three months apart, and observed measures of agreement (consistency) between coded records were obtained. A randomization procedure was used to provide distributions of chance levels of agreement between coded records with which observed measures were compared. Comparisons of the mothers' coded records indicated that they were able to identify infants' communicative acts consistently at each age.

This methodological study in 33 two-year-olds shows that child speech (total utterances, word roots, MLU) occurs at about the same level in different settings (the familiar home vs. the unfamiliar laboratory), but that children speak more and in more differentiated ways with different people (mother vs. stranger). Child speech also shows significant short- term stability. Girls use more different word roots and speak in longer utterances than do boys. In spontaneous child speech, cross-context generalizations appear warranted, but they also depend on conversational partner and gender of child.

This paper explores two Mandarin-speaking children's (3;2 and 3;3) ability to refer to the past in mother–child conversation. The approach encompasses morphosyntactic, semantic and discourse-pragmatic perspectives. The results show that the children tend to refer to immediate past spontaneously, but rely heavily on elicitation when referring to earlier past. It is suggested that maternal scaffolding functions as a discourse support for children to participate in conversation involving earlier past. When establishing past reference with overt temporal markers, the children resort mainly to aspect markers. In addition, they also rely on semantic and discourse-pragmatic resources for temporal inferencing, such as inherent semantic aspect, shared background knowledge and situational context.