An infant girl's unusual phonological behaviour was evaluated in the light of a maternai model which appeared to exaggerate features of normal conversational speech. It is suggested that parental responses to immature speech patterns may account for selected case study behaviours which have been reported in both the child phonology and child fluency literatures. It appears that evaluation of phonological development within an interactive framework may allow a more accurate picture of the conditions under which children learn speech skills. To this end, further study of the phonetic characteristics of input language and patterns of parental feedback to early articulatory attempts is desirable.

Previous research has examined children's ability to add inflections to nonsense words. The current experiments were designed to determine whether children, ranging in age from 1 ; 9 to 2 ; 10 (N=34), could demonstrate productivity by dropping verbal inflections. In Experiment 1, children added -ed and -ing to novel stems, and dropped them from novel inflected forms and did so largely appropriately. In Experiment 2, they dropped -ing from verbs, but not from nouns, suggesting that when young children drop inflections they tend to do so appropriately, and not simply for ease of pronunciation.

This study investigated how speaker certainty (a rational cue) and speaker benevolence (an emotional cue) influence children's willingness to learn words in a selective learning paradigm. In two experiments four- to six-year-olds learnt novel labels from two speakers and, after a week, their memory for these labels was reassessed. Results demonstrated that children retained the label–object pairings for at least a week. Furthermore, children preferred to learn from certain over uncertain speakers, but they had no significant preference for nice over nasty speakers. When the cues were combined, children followed certain speakers, even if they were nasty. However, children did prefer to learn from nice and certain speakers over nasty and certain speakers. These results suggest that rational cues regarding a speaker's linguistic competence trump emotional cues regarding a speaker's affective status in word learning. However, emotional cues were found to have a subtle influence on this process.

The outcome of scientific research depends on how a phenomenon is viewed and how the questions are phrased. This applies also to the nativist view of language acquisition. As a complement to MacWhinney's discussion of nativism from the viewpoint of cognitive psychology, I would like to devote this commentary to the question of the title from the viewpoint of computational linguistics.

In her new and again significant paper on fillers, Ann Peters does us the honour of referring to our three-stage model of premorphology, proto-morphology and morphology proper (or modularized morphology), especially in regard to fillers (cf. also Kilani-Schoch & Dressler (2000a, b), where ample data analyses are presented).

Drozd's critique of Crain & Thornton's (C&T) (1998) book Investigations in Universal Grammar (IUG) raises many issues concerning theory and experimental design within generative approaches to language acquisition. I focus here on one of the strongest theoretical claims of the Modularity Matching Model (MMM): continuity of processing. For reasons different to Drozd, I argue that the assumption is tenuous. Furthermore, I argue that the focus of the MMM and the methodological prescriptions contained in IUG are too narrow to capture language acquisition.

Children's responses to verbal instructions to place objects in, on, or under other objects were examined according to the paradigm developed by Clark (1973). In the present study, however, all objects were unfamiliar to the children, and were completely neutral and context-free. An additional task assessed children's comprehension of the spatial terms by asking them simply to point to objects in particular relationships without actually manipulating them. The results supported Clark's hypothesis of the influence of non-linguistic strategies on younger children's responses, in contradistinction to other studies critical of Clark's findings. However, when not required to manipulate the objects, children indicated greater comprehension than otherwise expected. The results are discussed in relation to the influence of task context on comprehension studies of this type.

In this study, monolingual (English) and bilingual (English/Spanish, English/Urdu) five- and six-year-old children completed a grammaticality judgment test in order to assess their awareness of the grammaticality of two types of syntactic constructions in English: word order and gender representation. All children were better at detecting grammatically correct and incorrect word order constructions than gender constructions, regardless of language group. In fact, bilingualism per se did not impact the results as much as receptive vocabulary range. For example, children with the highest receptive vocabulary scores were more accurate in detecting incorrect word order constructions (i.e., word order violations, semantic anomalies) and incorrect gender agreement than children in the lower receptive vocabulary ranges. However, no differences were found between the ranges for ambiguous gender constructions. These results highlight the importance of receptive vocabulary ability on syntactic awareness performance, regardless of language group.

Our knowledge and theories about language acquisition are skewed towards urban languages, and primarily English (Kidd & Garcia, 2022). Cristia and colleagues convincingly show that studies on the acquisition of rural languages are scarce. The authors suggest that in rural settings, combining experimental and observational approaches is critical to testing and sharpening our theories about language acquisition. Nevertheless, they also acknowledge the numerous challenges that make it difficult to conduct, analyse and publish this type of work.

Children learning English as an additional language (EAL) are a diverse and growing group of pupils in England’s schools. Relative to their monolingual (ML) peers, these children tend to show lower receptive and expressive vocabulary knowledge in English, although interpretation of findings is limited by small and heterogeneous samples. In an effort to increase representativeness and power, the present study combined published and unpublished datasets from six cross-sectional and four longitudinal studies investigating the vocabulary development of 434 EAL learners and 342 ML peers (age range: 4;9–11;5) in 42 primary schools. Multilevel modelling confirmed previous findings of significantly lower English vocabulary scores of EAL learners and some degree of convergence in receptive but not expressive knowledge by the end of primary school. Evidence for narrowing of the gap in receptive knowledge was found only in datasets spanning a longer developmental period, hinting at the protracted nature of this convergence.

While socioeconomic disparities in the home language environment have been well established, the mechanisms explaining these disparities are poorly understood. One plausible mechanism is heightened stress. The current study investigated whether maternal perceived stress was 1) associated with measures of the home language environment, and 2) mediated the relation between socioeconomic disparities and the home language environment. Data from three independent studies were analyzed, which together comprised 322 mother-child dyads. Two studies included mothers and their six- to twelve-month-old infants (N = 227). The third included mothers and their five- to nine-year-old children (N = 95). Mothers reported their educational attainment, income, and stress. Language Environment Analysis (LENA) measured the home language environment. As has been previously reported, socioeconomic disparities were observed in adult words and conversational turns. Stress did not mediate these associations, nor was it associated with adult words or conversational turns. Alternate mechanisms for future exploration are discussed.

Verb-marking errors are a characteristic feature of the speech of typically-developing (TD) children and are particularly prevalent in the speech of children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). However, both the pattern of verb-marking error in TD children and the pattern of verb-marking deficit in DLD vary across languages and interact with the semantic and syntactic properties of the language being learned. In this paper, we review work using a computational model called MOSAIC. We show how this work allows us to understand several features of the cross-linguistic data that are otherwise difficult to explain. We also show how discrepancies between the developmental data and the quantitative predictions generated by MOSAIC can be used to identify weaknesses in our current understanding and lead to further theory development; and how the resulting model (MOSAIC+) helps us understand differences in the cross-linguistic patterning of verb-marking errors in TD children and children with DLD.

This study investigated the claim that very young children avoid backwards coreference in their interpretation of sentences containing pronouns. Eighty-one children ranging in age from 3;1 to 8;0 and eight adults acted out four types of pronominal sentences. Cross-sectional data and individual response patterns reveal that children initially, prefer internal coreference even when such a response is disallowed for structural reasons. Avoidance of backwards coreference appears to be a late developing phenomenon characteristic of six-year-olds. Adult response patterns, which are manifested by some very young children, emerge as the dominant pattern by age seven.

Eight children aged 4;1–8;1 and their primary caregivers participated in a study designed to evaluate their use of the onset cluster /str-/ in both read and conversational speech. The cluster is currently undergoing a reported sound change in many varieties of English, with the initial /s/ being retracted to [ʃ]. The study compared the initial fricative of the cluster in both the children and their mothers. Acoustic analysis was carried out in order to categorize tokens as either [s] or [ʃ] using spectral peak analysis. Results found that children as young as 5;1 were starting to exhibit the usage patterns of their mothers. The distribution of the novel variant suggests that the children may be learning this form via a process of lexical diffusion rather than by rule. Implications for the study of dialect acquisition and phonological acquisition in general are discussed.

This paper investigates English-speaking children's acquisition of raising constructions (e.g. John seems to Mary to be happy) and finds an asymmetric effect of NP type on their comprehension: an improvement in performance is observed when a lexical NP is raised across a pronominal experiencer (e.g. John seems to her to be happy) compared to when a pronoun is raised across a lexical NP experiencer (e.g. He seems to Mary to be happy). These results are consistent with a processing-based approach to intervention effects, which reduces children's difficulty with raising to a performance limitation, rather than a grammatical deficit.

The study deals with children's use of the connective and to end a story. One hundred and ninety-one children (aged 7;0 to 11;0) who were native speakers of French told two-character comic strip stories with no text to a same-age peer. In the consecutive-display condition, the comic strip was in booklet format with one frame per page, whereas in the simultaneous-display condition, all frames were on the same page. In the arbitrary-sequence condition, the events in each comic strip, although presented as a sequence, could have occurred in any order, whereas in the ordered-sequence condition, the order of the events could not be changed. In the maintained-topic condition, the materials were designed to induce a thematic subject right after the first frame (by the repeated presence of the same character in every picture, up to and including the last one), whereas in the changed-topic condition, the other character appeared alone in the last frame.

The analysis focused on cases where the children began the narration of the last frame using and to change the text pattern established so far. The results showed that and was often used in this way (35·2% of the productions), especially in the experimental conditions that facilitated event interconnection (simultaneous display, ordered sequence, maintained topic). The ordered-sequence condition showed that the nine-year-olds in simultaneous display employed and in co-occurrence with another connective, whereas the eleven-year-olds mainly used and more specifically: when the topic changed. The discussion deals with the specialization during development of the use of and within a speaker's discourse.

Children with word finding difficulties (CwWFDs) are slower and less accurate at naming monomorphemic words than typically developing children (Dockrell, Messer & George, 2001), but their difficulty in naming morphologically complex words has not yet been investigated. One aim of this paper was to identify whether CwWFDs are similar to typically developing children at producing inflected (morphologically complex) words. A second aim was to investigate whether the dual-mechanism model could account for the use of morphology in a sample of CwWFDs, exemplifying the notion that regular inflections are part of a rule-based system and computed on-line, while irregular inflections are retrieved directly from the associative system (Pinker, 1999). The inflectional knowledge of a group of CwWFDs was compared against a group of language age-matched typically developing peers in three experiments. In Experiment 1 children produced the past tenses of high- and low-frequency regular and irregular English verbs. In Experiment 2 children generalized their knowledge of the past tense system onto nonsense verbs and in Experiment 3 children produced past tenses of verbs used in either a denominal or a verb root context. In each of these three studies, the CwWFDs performed similarly to matched typical children, suggesting that they do not have a selective problem with morphosyntactic features of words. The findings provide mixed support for the dual-mechanism model.