Two recent papers Wexler, Schütze & Rice (1998) and Rispoli (1999a) reach different conclusions concerning the relationship between finiteness marking and pronoun case errors. Wexler et al. claim they are linked, whereas Rispoli finds little evidence for such a linkage. Wexler et al. discounted data from children who made pronoun case errors in 100% of their attempts at a subject pronoun, whereas Rispoli (1999a) included data from such children. This methodological difference may account for our differing conclusions. Schütze (2001) defends the omission of these data, claiming that children who make a pronoun case error 100% of the time do so because the correct pronoun case form is not in the child's productive inventory. Longitudinal data is presented showing the inadequacy of this assumption. Children may err without variation AFTER a period of variation, indicating that these children have knowledge of the correct form. Apparent methodological differences between the two papers reveal deeper theoretical biases. The paradigm building approach taken by Rispoli views longitudinal variation of this sort as a reflection of lexical retrieval principles at work in a developing paradigm. In contrast, the Agr/Tns Omission Model of Wexler et al. finds such variation an uncomfortable inconvenience.

Current views on the acquisition of PRO can roughly be divided into two areas: lexical and syntactic accounts. We present data on one verb, decide, that yields data that not only differs from the data for other similar verbs with the same children, but does not lend itself easily to either type of account. Data from a sentence elicitation task conducted with 20 typically-developing children (4 ; 0–7 ; 11), along with 3 case studies illustrate that children may not be assigning a referent for PRO in an adult-like manner for particular verbs. Instead they may be overgeneralizing the use of non-finite complements to finite contexts.

While adult studies show that consonants are more important than vowels in lexical processing tasks, the developmental trajectory of this consonant bias varies cross-linguistically. This study tested whether British English-learning 11-month-old infants’ recognition of familiar word forms is more reliant on consonants than vowels, as found by Poltrock and Nazzi (2015) in French. After establishing that infants prefer listening to a list of familiar words over pseudowords (Experiment 1), Experiment 2 examined preference for consonant versus vowel mispronunciations of these words. Infants listened to both alterations equally. In Experiment 3, using a simplified version of the task with one familiar word only (‘mummy’), infants’ preference for its correct pronunciation over a consonant or a vowel change confirmed an equal sensitivity to both alterations. British English-learning infants’ word form recognition appears to be equally impacted by consonant and vowel information, providing further evidence that initial lexical processes vary cross-linguistically.

This research addressed the question of whether children understand proper names differently from descriptions. We examined how children extend these two types of expressions from an initial object (a truck) owned by the experimenter to two identical objects created by transforming the initial object, both owned by the experimenter. Adults and 5/6-year-olds extended a name (“Tommy”) to only one post-transformation object, but extended a description (“my truck”) to both objects. Adults and 7-year-olds (but not 5/6-year-olds) also extended a description modeled as a name (“called My Truck”) to only one object. Like adults, children understand that proper names identify unique individuals, but that descriptions identify properties.

MacWhinney argues that the logical problem of language acquisition is no longer. It was a problem back in the 1970s when the guiding premises of the field were that language structure is highly abstract, that the child's input is a poor source of information about grammar, and that the child's learning mechanisms are inadequate to bridge the gap between the input the child receives and the grammar the child acquires. Now, however, we have new linguistic theories which show that language structure is not abstract but arises from cognition, and we have evidence that input is a rich source of information, and we have reason to believe that the child has a powerful array of learning procedures at his or her disposal. The gap between input and acquisition thought to exist in the 1970s has been closed, and thus, MacWhinney argues, there is no need to attribute innate linguistic knowledge to the child.

The present study investigates the production and comprehension of indefinite and definite articles as markers of givenness by typically-developing German-speaking children, from the perspective of information structure theory. The study involves 93 typically-developing children aged four to seven years old with normal language-skills and 20 adults. The results of a story-narration task and a truth-value judgment task reveal that children have more problems with new than with given referents in production as well as comprehension suggesting a “given better than new”-pattern. These findings are explained in the context of perspective-taking capacities and cue weighting theory.

Using the methods of conversation analysis, the opening sequences of a map task in the interactions of sixteen children aged seven to twelve were analyzed. The analytical concerns driving the study were who started, how they started, and how children dealt with differential access to information and the identification of phases within the opening. It was found that all participants oriented to the instruction-giver as the one to start, even when the information-follower commenced the task. With respect to how to start, the older children produced a question and answer sequence or a try-mark to establish a common starting point. Five of the eight younger children inferred a common starting point on the map. Three recurring phases were identified: readiness to begin established through a discourse marker, location of the starting point, and actual instruction. The findings are discussed with reference to the importance of interaction in referential spatial tasks.

The study used naturalistic data on the production of nominal prefixes in the Otopamean language Northern Pame (autonym: Xi'iuy) to test Whole Word (constructivist) and Minimal Word (prosodic) theories for the acquisition of inflection. Whole Word theories assume that children store words in their entirety; Minimal Word theories assume that children produce words as binary feet. Northern Pame uses obligatory portmanteaux prefixes to inflect nouns for class, number, animacy and possessor. Singular nouns constitute 90 percent of the nouns that the children hear and yet all five two-year-old children frequently omitted the singular noun prefixes, but produced the low frequency noun suffixes for dual and animate plural. Neither the children's production of the noun-class prefixes nor their prefix overextensions correlated with the adult type and token frequencies of production. Northern Pame children constructed Minimal Words that contain binary feet and disfavor the production of initial, extrametrical prefixes.

We examined whether and how the degree of meaning overlap between morphologically related words influences sentence plausibility judgment in children. In two separate studies with kindergarten and second-graders, English-speaking and French-speaking children judged the plausibility of sentences that included two paired target words. Some of these word pairs were morphologically related, across three conditions with differing levels of meaning overlap: low (wait-waiter), moderate (fold-folder) and high (farm-farmer). In another two conditions, word pairs were related only by phonology (rock-rocket) or semantics (car-automobile). Children in both ages and languages demonstrated higher plausibility scores as meaning overlap increased between morphologically related words. Further, kindergarten children rated sentences that included word pairs with phonological overlap as more plausible than second-grade children, while second-grade children rated those with high meaning overlap as more plausible than kindergarten children. We interpret these findings in light of current models of morphological development.

Among the various processes that characterize the development of literacy competence presented by Ravid & Tolchinsky in their paper, two are particularly relevant for studies of language development focusing on crosslinguistic sentence processing: (1) the continuity vs. discontinuity between the differential access to oral and written codes within the same language and between languages; (2) the representational status of the conscious access to language provided by the development of literacy, which renders variability more accessible and controllable. In this short note, I shall deal only with the first of these.