This paper investigates the similarities and differences observed in individual approaches to the linguistic organization of narrative. Twenty subjects in each of five age groups (four, six, eight, ten years and adult) were asked to relate a narrative elicited from a picture book. All references to the animate characters in the book were coded for form (nominal/pronominal), and function (switch versus maintenance). Individual analyses of the narratives indicated that a variety of strategies were used across all age groups. Strategies identified included thematic subject, nominal and anaphoric. When the narrative was divided into segments based on the referential load of each segment, it was found that there was an interaction between the strategy adopted in the first segment, the age of the subject and the referential load of subsequent segments. A variety of strategies was adopted by all age groups although there were preferential trends observable within each group. The ability to maintain a strategy across the varying referential load of the narrative increased with age. Five developmental stages were identified from the analysis which enabled certain tentative predictions to be made about the way children approach a complex narrative task, suggesting that children pass through a number of stages which reflect their ability to organize the referential content of the narrative at differing speech levels.

This paper presents a longitudinal study on the acquisition of first, second, and third person pronouns in twelve French-speaking and twelve English-speaking children. Comprehension and production data were collected every two months, beginning when the subjects were aged 1;6 and ending once pronouns were fully acquired. Three hypotheses concerning the rules children develop in learning pronouns were tested: (1) the person-role hypothesis (Charney, 1980), (2) the speech-role hypothesis (Clark, 1978), and (3) the name hypothesis (Clark, 1978). An analysis of children's pronominal confusion when they were addressed listeners as well as when they were non-addressed listeners was performed. The results indicated that the mastery of pronouns did not follow the developmental sequence predicted by the speech-role hypothesis; they provided evidence for the person-role hypothesis only when children were speakers, and partially supported the name hypothesis. The data also suggested that pronominal confusion is not a rare phenomenon among children tested in a non-addressee context. Finally, effects of child gender and native language were observed. Possible interpretations of the data are discussed.

The present paper reports on the phonological form of one child's productive vocabulary from age 0;10 to 1;8 with primary focus on his production of multisyllabic targets. A large percentage of his multisyllabic vocabulary was produced as one syllable until the age of 1;6. This limitation was not due to a tendency to extract only single syllables from the speech stream, but rather due primarily to a limitation on production. While some portion of his one-syllable productions could be interpreted as the result of single syllable extraction, a sizeable portion affirmed that he extracted the target size correctly by his inclusion of first and final target phonemes in his productions (e.g. [po] for piano and [kiz] for candies). The resolution of this limitation coincides with his move toward two-word speech. We conclude that there is a developmental and perhaps maturational limitation in the capacity to carry out the processes underlying word and sentence production.

The present study examined the pattern of deletion of final /t/ and /d/ in word final consonant clusters in sixteen three- and four-year-old children and their degree of mastery of phonological and grammatical constraints to answer the following questions: how and when is this variable rule acquired, and how does its acquisition relate to the learning of the categorical rule of past tense formation? Sixteen children were tape recorded in their South Philadelphia day care centre. In addition, eight of their mothers were interviewed in their homes for purposes of comparison.

Results of the study revealed that children as young as three had, for the most part, mastered the phonological constraints on (-t, d) deletion. They matched the adult pattern including the constraint of following pause disfavouring deletion, the only one that has been shown to vary according to geographical dialect. The children also made a consistent and adult-like distinction between the grammatical forms of monomorpheme and weak past tense. Their high rate of deletion in semi-weak verbs, which differs from adult patterns, suggests that the children are demonstrating rule acquisition based on an analysis of verbal inflection.

A fundamental question of child language acquisition is children's productivity with newly learned forms. The current study addressed this question experimentally with children just beginning to combine words. Ten children between 1;6 and 1;11 were taught four new words, two nouns and two verbs, over multiple sessions. All four words were modelled in minimal syntactic contexts. The experimenter gave children multiple opportunities to produce the words and made attempts to elicit morphological endings (plural for nouns, past tense for verbs). Overall, children combined the novel nouns productively with already known words much more often than they did the novel verbs – by many orders of magnitude. Several children also pluralized a newly learned noun, whereas none of them formed a past tense with a newly learned verb. A follow-up study using a slightly different methodology confirmed the finding of limited syntactic productivity with verbs. Hypotheses accounting for this asymmetry in the early use of nouns and verbs are discussed.

The ability to generalize verbs to new examples of previously labelled events demonstrates an implicit understanding that verbs are representative symbols of categories of events. The present study examined when and how very young children generalize familiar verbs to novel events by using the preferential looking paradigm. Overall, 24 children aged 1;8 and 25 children aged 2;2 demonstrated their understanding of the verbs kick and pick-up by looking significantly longer at the target events on control trials. Additionally, children aged 1;8 with the largest expressive vocabulary generalized the same verbs to actions with different agents, but not to actions differing in outcome or manner of action. In contrast, children aged 2;2 consistently extended familiar action verbs to other actions differing in agent or manner, regardless of the size of their expressive vocabulary. These findings were not due to the saliency of any of the actions used and are interpreted in terms of representational change consistent with the acquisition of lexical learning principles.

The study of bilingualism has often focused on two contradictory possibilities: that the learning of two languages may produce deficits of performance in each language by comparison with performance of monolingual individuals, or on the contrary, that the learning of two languages may produce linguistic or cognitive advantages with regard to the monolingual learning experience. The work reported here addressed the possibility that the very early bilingual experience of infancy may affect the unfolding of vocal precursors to speech. The results of longitudinal research with 73 infants aged 0;4 to 1;6 in monolingual and bilingual environments provided no support for either a bilingual deficit hypothesis nor for its opposite, a bilingual advantage hypothesis. Infants reared in bilingual and monolingual environments manifested similar ages of onset for canonical babbling (production of well-formed syllables), an event known to be fundamentally related to speech development. Further, quantitative measures of vocal performance (proportion of usage of well-formed syllables and vowel-like sounds) showed additional similarities between monolingual and bilingual infants. The similarities applied to infants of middle and low socio-economic status and to infants that were born at term or prematurely. The results suggest that vocal development in the first year of life is robust with respect to conditions of rearing. The biological foundations of speech appear to be such as to resist modifications in the natural schedule of vocal development.

Mothers' provision of names for novel and familiar toy animals was examined during play interactions with 20 infants observed at ages 0;10, 1;1, 1;5, and 1;9. Of particular interest were characteristics of mothers' speech which might bear on children's development of lexical principles or constraints. Analyses demonstrated that mothers facilitated their children's determination of reference and differentially adjusted their naming practices to novel, comprehended, and familiar animals. They virtually always named the whole object first. More important, the first mention of novel, but not comprehended or familiar animals involved both maternal naming and physical designation of the object 92% or more of the time. Thus, although a novel word's referent may be indeterminate logically, mothers specify it practically. These results support the position that maternal labelling practices may assist children in acquiring lexical principles and that lexical acquisition, perhaps even the vocabulary spurt, can proceed during natural conversational interactions before infants master lexical principles.

The effect of homonymity on children's use of semantic context to derive word meaning was examined in two studies. Participants were presented with stories that included three types of key words: nonsense words, familiar words used accurately, and homonymous words. Thirty-two preschoolers aged 3;7 to 5;4, 32 second graders aged 7;1 to 8;8, and 16 college students in Study 1 indicated the keys words' meaning by selecting one of six possible illustrations per key word. In Study 2, 16 toddlers aged 2;9 to 3;3, 32 preschoolers aged 4;0 to 4;11, 32 second graders aged 7;0 to 8;11, and 32 fifth graders aged 10;1 to 11;8 indicated key word meanings either by enacting each story with paper dolls or by selecting one of six possible illustrations. Word type and age, but not response mode, affected children's interpretations. Children from all four age groups made fewer contextually based interpretations of homonymous words than of nonsense words. Fifth graders and adults made more contextually based (rather than literal) interpretations of homonymous words than did younger children. The results suggest that homonymity is a powerful inhibitor of children's tendency to derive a meaning for a new word from context.

The communicative interactions of 15 dyads of four- to five-year-olds during pretend play involving routine, or scripted, events were investigated as a function of the children's knowledge of the scripts. Measures of the quantity and quality of interaction and the strategies that the children used to establish mutual knowledge (i.e. assess and adapt to their discourse partner's level of expertise), which is essential to good communication, were examined. Each dyad participated in a MATCHED condition (both members had extensive knowledge of the script) and a MISMATCHED condition (one member had extensive script knowledge and the other did not). Shared script knowledge facilitated communicative interactions, as indicated by more topic maintenance and fewer requests for clarification in the matched condition than in the mismatched condition. The children attempted to establish mutual knowledge more frequently in the mismatched condition than in the matched condition and, moreover, mutual knowledge establishment was related to the children's communicative effectiveness.

Kim, Marcus, Pinker, Hollander & Coppola (1994) argue that the preference children and adults show for regular inflection for verbs and nouns with novel meanings (e.g. The batter *flew/flied out to centre field) should be attributed to their grammatically based sensitivity to the derivations of these verbs and nouns. However, it could also be that speakers avoid the use of irregular forms to avoid conveying the conventional meaning associated with the irregular form, such as literally flying to centre field. This paper, in reply to Kim et al. (1994), reinterprets their findings and argues for a semantic/functional account, without resorting to a grammatical account.