We investigated the effects of semantic predictability on children's preservation of the /t/-/d/ phonemic voice contrast in American English. In Experiment 1, a total of 36 seven-, nine-, and twelve-year-olds produced minimal pairs differing in intervocalic /t/ and /d/ in semantically biasing and semantically neutral passages. The seven-year-olds preserved the phonemic contrast in both passage types. However, for the nine- and twelve-year-olds, total word duration and preceding vowel duration preserved the /t/-/d/ contrast, but this interacted with semantic predictability. The contrast was preserved in the biasing and not in the neutral passages. The production results from the older children replicated previous findings from adults, demonstrating that semantic predictability influences speech production at both a lexical and a segmental level. In Experiment 2, listeners identified the tokens produced in Experiment 1. The identification results suggested that differences produced by speakers may not necessarily have a functional role for listeners. An interactive activation framework is proposed to account for the semantic effects on older children's and adults' production. For the youngest children, however, we suggest that pragmatic compensation and task demands interact with the effects of interactive activation.

Grammatical inflections such as the English plural noun -s and third person singular verb -s are acquired at different points in time by young children. This finding is typically attributed to factors such as relative semantic salience or the distinction between lexical and functional categories. In this study input frequency, sentence position, and duration were examined as possible contributing factors. In both conversations with and stories aimed at young children, noun plural inflections were found to be more frequent than third singular verb inflections, especially in sentence-final position. Analysis of the speech of four mothers reading stories to their two-year-old children confirmed that duration differences also exist in the input. Because fricatives were lengthened in sentence-final position and plural nouns were much more likely to appear in these positions than were third singular verb forms, plural nouns were significantly longer than third singular inflections on average. The possible implications of these findings for language learnability theories and accounts of grammatical deficits in specific language impairment are discussed.

Although most English-speaking children master the correct use of first and second person pronouns by three years, some children show persistent reversal errors in which they refer to themselves as you and to others as me. Recently, such differences have been attributed to the relative availability of overheard speech during the learning process. The present study tested this proposal with feed-forward neural networks learning these pronouns. Network learning speed and analysis of their knowledge representations confirmed the importance of exposure to shifting reference provided by overheard speech. Errorless pronoun learning was linked to the amount of overheard speech, interactions with a greater number of speakers, and prior knowledge of the basic-level kind PERSON.

Icelandic and Norwegian past tense morphology contain strong patterns of inflection and two weak patterns of inflection. We report the results of an elicitation task that tests Icelandic and Norwegian children's knowledge of the past tense forms of a representative sample of verbs. This cross-sectional study of four-, six- and eight-year-old Icelandic (n=92) and Norwegian (n=96) children systematically manipulates verb characteristics such as type frequency, token frequency and phonological coherence – factors that are generally considered to have an important impact on the acquisition of inflectional morphology in other languages. Our findings confirm that these factors play an important role in the acquisition of Icelandic and Norwegian. In addition, the results indicate that the predominant source of errors in children shifts during the later stages of development from one weak verb class to the other. We conclude that these findings are consistent with the view that exemplar-based learning, whereby patterns of categorization and generalization are driven by similarity to known forms, appropriately characterizes the acquisition of inflectional systems by Icelandic and Norwegian children.

The first verbs to participate in VO and SVO combinations, and the temporal parameters of the spread of these combinatory patterns over different verbs were investigated. The longitudinal language observations of 16 children, one acquiring English, the others Hebrew, were examined. The children were observed once a week for 3–12 months, the observations starting when the children were still in the single-word stage (1;1–2;1) and ending when they were well into multiword speech (1;8–2;7). The results indicate that the more verbs children already know to combine in a certain pattern, the faster they learn new ones. Apparently children induce from individual word-combinations some general principles that facilitate further learning. The ‘pathbreaking verbs’ that begin the acquisition of a novel syntactic rule tend to be generic verbs expressing the relevant combinatorial property in a relatively pure fashion: the same verbs that children first combine with direct objects, are typical grammaticalized markers of transitivity in many languages. These verbs do not have HIGH TRANSITIVITY as defined by Hopper & Thompson (1980). Rather, they express fundamental ‘object relations’ of incorporation into, and ejection from the personal. Crosslinguistic evidence indicates that this may be the basic transitivity construct in languages. The results raise the possibility that lexical-specific learning of positional patterns is sufficient to account for the formation of syntactic abstractions.

Blind children are considered to use personal reference terms late and with a great deal of reversal errors. However, in previous research, there has been a dearth of both quantitative and qualitative data on their use of pronouns. In the present paper data from a longitudinal study of five children (three totally blind, one partially sighted, and one sighted) is presented. The children had different ages at the begining of the study, ranging from 0;9 to 2;5, and were followed for a time span of over 12 months. Every spatial deictic term and personal reference term used by the children was analysed. Special attention was given to the analysis of the reversal errors. The data obtained clearly showed that the blind children began to use personal reference terms as early as the sighted children, and that the use of reversals was not a general characteristic of the language of the blind children, since only one of the four blind or partially sighted children produced a noticeable percentage of reversals. The analysis of the contexts in which reversal errors were produced showed that imitation does not fully explain them, and some proposals for a multiplex explanation of reversals are offered. Thus, the data do not give support to the idea that blind children in general show problems with pronouns, nor to those claims that link blind children with autistic children in this regard.

This study examined the evolution of visual perspective-taking skills in relation to the comprehension and production of first, second and third person pronouns. Twelve French-speaking and 12 English-speaking children were observed longitudinally from 1;6 until they had acquired all pronouns and succeeded on all tasks. Free-play sessions and three tasks were used to test pronominal competence. Four other tasks assessed Level-1 perspective-taking skills: two of these tasks required the capacity to consider two visual perspectives, and two others tested the capacity to coordinate three such perspectives. The results indicated that children's performance on perspective-taking tasks was correlated with full pronoun acquisition. Moreover, competence at coordinating two visual perspectives preceded the full mastery of first and second person pronouns, and competence at coordinating three perspectives preceded the full mastery of third person pronouns when a strict criterion was adopted. However, with less stringent criteria, the sequence from perspective taking to pronoun acquisition varied either slightly or considerably. These findings are discussed in the light of the ‘specificity hypothesis’ concerning the links between cognition and language, and also in the context of the recent body of research on the child's developing theory of mind.

Children's narratives consist of event clauses and contextualizing or ‘evaluative’ clauses. Bamberg & Damrad-Frye (1991) and Bamberg (1994) claimed that young children make limited use of evaluative clauses because they are less able to adopt a global perspective on the narrative. In an earlier study, Karmiloff-Smith (1985) demonstrated that the narratives of younger children have coherence only at a local level. However, Wellman & Bartsch (1988) showed that young children could produce evaluative-like causal explanations if given a specific prompt. The present study on 160 young children aged five, seven, nine and eleven years examined their production of evaluatives in narratives of a story presented as a video sequence with no spoken dialogue, to ensure that the children's production was not simply a re-working of verbal input. Results indicated that prompts greatly facilitated children's production of evaluatives and that they could adopt a global perspective on the story when formulating evaluatives.

These results indicate that limitations in the narratives of young children are more plausibly explained by contextual factors influencing language production and by constraints on working memory than by children's presumed lack of understanding of the structure of events or their inferences about the minds of the characters.

The ability to justify one's beliefs or actions requires linguistic, social, and cognitive skills, including an understanding of the psychological states of others and the negotiation of a socially-sensitive discourse. The production of verbal justifications was examined both quantitatively and qualitatively in eight pairs of eight- to eleven-year-old children whose natural discourse was videotaped, transcribed and coded for justifications. Previous research has frequently studied justifications in conflicts; children in this study produced most of their justifications both in the context of elaborating on a previously asserted claim and in conflicts. The statement justified and the justifications themselves most frequently focused on facts, evaluations, actions, and habitual characteristics or occurrences. A majority of the justifications were produced to support a statement which had some negative valence to it. Although causal connectives have previously been often used as the means for determining justifications, the children in this study rarely used causal connectives and mental verbs in statements with justifications. A qualitative analysis of the discourse of the dyads revealed differences in conversational styles which produced very different types of justifications. Some dyads made frequent use of narratives and co-constructed justifications; other dyads generally produced very short, often isolated justifications.

Rispoli (1998) presents data to motivate a model of pronoun case errors in child English. His data consist of relative rates of occurrence of errors involving particular forms in the study of twenty-seven English children between the ages of 2;6 and 4;0. I show that his claim that overextensions of he and him are antagonistic cannot be maintained. I argue that his explanation for why her subjects are more frequent than other errors is insufficient, and suggest an account in terms of relative input frequencies. Finally, I demonstrate that the fundamental assumption underlying Rispoli's model is untenable, and that his findings are not counterevidence for developmental syntax models such as that of Schütze (1997).