The hypothesis that there is a close relationship between object permanence and early language acquisition has not been supported by most previous research. McCune-Nicolich (1981), however, performed a detailed theoretical analysis and, as a result, found a close relationship between stage 6 object permanence development and the use of relational words. Unlike previous studies which used mostly quantitative measures of language, McCune-Nicolich related object permanence to the semantic content of the child's early words. She concluded that relational words enter the child's lexicon ‘as a group’ during stage 6, due in part to the development of the cognitive abilities of that stage. The current study attempts to make this claim more specific and consequently more accurate. Relational words requiring the conceptualization of the visible displacement of objects should emerge during stage 5, those involving invisible displacements during stage 6, and those referring to more complex spatial displacements only later during the pre-operational period. Data from a longitudinal study of six 1-year-olds corroborate this more specific account.

Children between the ages of three and seven occasionally make errors with locative verbs like pour and fill, such as * I filled water into the glass and * I poured the glass with water (Bowerman, 1982). To account for this pattern of errors, and for how they are eventually unlearned, we propose that children use a universal linking rule called OBJECT AFFECTEDNESS: the direct object corresponds to the argument that is specified as ‘affected’ in some particular way in the semantic representation of a verb. However, children must learn which verbs specify which of their arguments as being affected; specifically, whether it is the argument whose referent is undergoing a change of location, such as the content argument of pour, or the argument whose referent is undergoing a change of state, such as the container argument of fill. This predicts that syntactic errors should be associated with specific kinds of misinterpretations of verb meaning. Two experiments were performed on the ability of children and adults to understand and produce locative verbs. The results confirm that children tend to make syntactic errors with sentences containing fill and empty, encoding the content argument as direct object (e.g. fill the water). As predicted, children also misinterpreted the meanings of fill and empty as requiring not only that the container be brought into a full or empty state, but also that the content move in some specific manner (by pouring, or by dumping). Furthermore, children who misinterpreted the verbs' meanings were more likely to make syntactic errors with them. These findings support the hypothesis that verb meaning and syntax are linked in precise ways in the lexicons of language learners.

The present study investigates the possibility that the previously documented relationship between referential–expressive and nominal–pronominal styles (Nelson, 1975) may be best explained not so much in terms of ‘object-orientation’ or ‘noun-preference’, as in terms of the direction from which different children break into structure, with some children tending to construct patterns by combining two or more items from their single-word vocabularies and others tending to develop patterns by gaining productive control over ‘slots’ in previously unanalysed phrases. In order to do so it makes use of a methodology for distinguishing between productive and unanalysed multi-word speech proposed in Lieven, Pine & Dresner-Barnes (1992) which is applied to observational and maternal-report data from a longitudinal study of seven children between the ages of 0; 11 and 1; 8. The results suggest not only that variation in children's early word combinations can indeed be explained in terms of different routes to multi-word speech, but also that, far from being atypical, a strategy involving the breaking down of originally unanalysed phrases may be used by all children, though to varying degrees.

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.

In the present longitudinal study, we examined changes in parental labelling and infants' categorization skills as potential predictors of vocabulary composition, the age of the naming explosion, and the acquisition of subordinate labels. Sixteen French- and English-speaking parent–child dyads were videotaped during a 2O-minute free-play session every month beginning when the child was 1;0 and ending at 2;0. The children received object-manipulation tasks every three months and their vocabulary growth was recorded. Parental labelling practices were assessed monthly using a picture-book reading task. Both parental labelling and children's categorization skills predicted the content of children's lexicon, with children with more names in their vocabulary having better categorization skills. Furthermore, the naming explosion was found to coincide with improvement of categorization skills. These findings suggest that the influence of each factor varies as a function of the stage and aspect of lexical development considered.

Phonological awareness skills are critical for reading acquisition, yet relatively little is known about the origins of phonological awareness. This study investigates one plausible source of the emergence of phonological awareness, phonological neighbourhood density. As vocabulary grows, the number of similar-sounding words in the child's mental lexicon increases. This could create developmental pressure to develop awareness of sub-units within words such as syllables, rhymes and phonemes. If this is the case, then neighbourhood density effects should be discernible in phonological awareness tasks. Children should be more successful in these tasks with words from dense phonological neighbourhoods, as they should show greater awareness of sub-units within these words. We investigated this hypothesis in a group of 48 five-year-old children, most of whom were pre-readers. The five-year-olds with a high vocabulary age showed neighbourhood density effects in a rhyme oddity task, but five-year-olds with lower vocabulary ages did not. This suggests that vocabulary acquisition and consequent neighbourhood density effects are indeed one source of the emergence of phonological awareness skills in pre-readers.

Two branches of language functioning are now actively being studied: one focuses on language as a system for expressing syntactic-semantic relations, the other as a system of interpersonal communication. In this paper, a case is presented of a child who at 3; 3 showed a marked schism between these two areas. In the former domain he displayed behaviour that in most respects was age appropriate and relatively extensive. In the latter domain, he displayed almost totally ineffective functioning. His difficulties in the use of language for communication were mirrored from infancy by a serious failure either to understand or produce non-verbal communication (e.g. gestures). It is suggested that the structural and communicative aspects of language are based upon different sets of skills which particularly in cases of language disorder may function independently of one another.

The acquisition of case and gender marking on the definite and indefinite article was studied in a sample of 6 normally-hearing children and 9 children with cochlear implants. Longitudinal spontaneous speech data are used. Children were matched by MLU, with 4 MLU levels: 1·8, 2·8, 3·6, 4·8. Age ranges for normally-hearing children were 1;4 to 3;8 and for children with cochlear implants 1;8 to 7;0. Frequencies of correctly marked article forms increased over MLU but less so in the hearing-impaired group. In both groups error rates were high. However, error patterns were different. In normally-hearing children errors of case predominated, in hearing-impaired children errors of gender and omission. Error patterns suggest that in normally-hearing children syntactic categorization interacts with input frequency and low discriminability of article forms. In the hearing-impaired group the article system is less advanced, despite higher frequencies of definite articles in adult speech. The predominance of article omission is discussed in terms of persisting perceptual problems or a working memory deficit.

Marcus, Pinker, Ullman, Hollander, Rosen & Xu (1992) claim that when the irregular past form of a verb is known, it is immediately known to be the correct form, such that overregularizations only occur as speech errors, not as a genuine grammatical alternative; as a result, they argue, overregularization rates are, when carefully inspected, very low. In the present paper: (1) it is shown that even if overregularizations are a genuine grammatical alternative, overall rates in samples would still be low for most children; (2) careful analysis shows evidence for substantial overregularization periods in three longitudinal subjects ages 2; 5–5; 2 (Abe), 2; 3–5; 2 (Adam) and 2; 3–5; 0 (Sarah); (3) Abe's much higher rates follow from general developments in his past tense acquisition, in ways not consonant with Marcus et al.'s formulations.

We investigated two main components of infant declarative pointing, reference and attitude, in two experiments with a total of 106 preverbal infants at 1;0. When an experimenter (E) responded to the declarative pointing of these infants by attending to an incorrect referent (with positive attitude), infants repeated pointing within trials to redirect E’s attention, showing an understanding of E’s reference and active message repair. In contrast, when E identified infants’ referent correctly but displayed a disinterested attitude, infants did not repeat pointing within trials and pointed overall in fewer trials, showing an understanding of E’s unenthusiastic attitude about the referent. When E attended to infants’ intended referent AND shared interest in it, infants were most satisfied, showing no message repair within trials and pointing overall in more trials. These results suggest that by twelve months of age infant declarative pointing is a full communicative act aimed at sharing with others both attention to a referent and a specific attitude about that referent.

Many theories of grammatical and lexical acquisition assume that children learn predominantly nouns, and specifically names of objects, when they first begin to acquire words in the second year. We show that the noun bias in early vocabularies is far from universal, and that it rests only in part on the acquisition of object names. An analysis of vocabulary composition from 45 children at 1;8 indicates that more nouns are acquired than all other word classes, but that of the nouns acquired only about half are the names of basic level object classes (BLOCS). An examination of the use of nouns in mother-child discourse shows that non-object words referencing locations, actions and events, for example, are used in distinctive pragmatic and grammatical contexts which might enable a child to grasp the word's use and eventually its meaning. It is concluded that a theory of lexical acquisition in discourse context is required to explain word learning at all levels and for all word types. Implications for semantic bootstrapping theories are considered.

We present morphological analyses of verb inflections produced by 15 Spanish-speaking children (age range: 1;7 to 4;7) taken from longitudinal and cross-sectional samples of spontaneous speech and narratives. Our main observation is the existence of a dissociation between regular and irregular processes in the distribution of errors: regular suffixes and unmarked (non-alternating) stems are over-extended to irregulars in children's inflection errors, but not vice versa. We also found that overregularization errors at all ages are only a small minority of the children's irregular verbs, that the period of overregularization is preceded by a stage without errors, and that the onset of overregularizations is connected to the emergence of obligatory finiteness markings. These findings are explained in terms of the dual-mechanism model of inflection.

Charles-Luce & Luce (1990) found smaller phonological similarity neighbourhoods in five- and seven-year-old children's expressive lexicons than in an adult receptive lexicon, a finding they interpreted as evidence that children need not employ fine-grained auditory perceptual analyses in lexical processing. In the present investigation, neighbourhood sizes were calculated for an expressive lexicon derived from two vocabulary lists representative of children aged 1;0 to 3;0 (Rescorla, 1989; Reznick & Goldsmith, 1989). Over 80% of the words in these early lexicons had at least one phonological neighbour; nearly 20% had six or more phonological neighbours. Very young children must have access to reasonably detailed phonological information in order to create and distinguish among such phonologically similar lexical entries.

This study examines mealtimes of preschoolers' families to determine whether rare words are used in informative ways so that a child could learn their meanings. Is there an association between informative use of rare words and the child's later vocabulary? Each use of rare words in 160 transcripts was coded for whether it was informative or uninformative. Each informative exchange was coded for type of strategy used to provide support: physical or social context, prior knowledge, and semantic support. There were 1,631 exchanges around rare words. About two-thirds of these exchanges were informative uses from which the child could learn the word's meaning. The most frequent strategy used was semantic support, accounting for two-thirds of strategies used. The frequency of use of rare words was positively correlated with age-five and age-seven PPVT scores.

When repeating spoken sentences, children who are good readers tend to be more accurate than poor readers because they are able to make more effective use of phonetic representation in the service of working memory (Mann, Liberman & Shankweiler 1980). This study of good and poor readers in the third grade has assessed both the repetition and comprehension of relative-clause sentences to explore more fully the association between early reading ability, spoken sentence processing and use of phonetic representation. It was found that the poor readers did less well than the good readers on sentence comprehension as well as on sentence repetition, and that their comprehension errors reflected a greater reliance on two sentence-processing strategies favoured by young children: the minimum-distance principle and conjoined-clause analysis. In general, the pattern of results is consonant with a view that difficulties with phonetic representation could underlie the inferior sentence comprehension of poor beginning readers. The finding that these children place greater reliance on immature processing strategies raises the further possibility that the tempo of their syntactic development may be slower than that of good readers.

The Macarthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) have been used widely to document early communicative development. The paper reports on a large community sample of 1,447 children recruited from low, middle and high socioeconomic (SES) areas across metropolitan Melbourne, Australia. Regression analyses were conducted to determine the extent to which communicative behaviours reported at 0 ; 8 and 1 ; 0 predicted vocabulary development at 1 ; 0 and 2 ; 0. In support of previous findings with smaller, often less representative samples, gesture and object use at 1 ; 0 were better predictors of 2 ; 0 vocabulary than were gesture and object use at 0 ; 8. At 1 ; 0, children from the lower SES groups were reported to understand more words than children from the higher SES groups, but there were no SES differences for words produced at 1 ; 0 or 2 ; 0. The findings add to our understanding of the variability in the development of early communicative behaviours.

Although higher pitch has been described as a universal feature of babytalk (BT) registers worldwide, analysis of a sample of three Quiche Mayan-speaking mothers addressing their infant children indicated that their BT register does not utilize this feature. Quiche mothers either make no pitch distinction in speech to young children, or actually lower pitch slightly in comparison with their Adult–Adult interaction style. A comparison group of American mothers raised pitch 35–70 Hz when addressing infants of the same age and language maturity. We posit that pitch-raising strategies may be sociolinguistically determined and may serve different functions across languages.

In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigate adults' and children's on-line processing of referentially ambiguous English pronouns. Sixteen adults and 16 four-to-seven-year-olds listened to sentences with either an unambiguous reflexive (himself) or an ambiguous pronoun (him) and chose a picture with two characters that corresponded to those in the sentence. For adults, behavioural data, responses and reaction times indicate that pronouns are referentially ambiguous. Adults' eye movements show a competition between the looks to sentence-internal and -external referents for pronouns, but not for reflexives. Children overwhelmingly prefer the sentence-internal referent in the off-line picture selection task. However, their eye movements reveal implicit awareness of referential ambiguity that develops earlier than their explicit knowledge in the picture selection task. This discrepancy between performance on a looking measure and a pointing measure in the children's processing system is explained by a general dissociation between implicit and explicit knowledge proposed in recent literature on cognitive development.

The two- and three-syllable reduplicative babbling of five French-learning and five English-learning infants (0;5 to 1; 1) was examined in two ways for intonational differences. The first measure was a categorization into one of five categories (RISING, FALLING, RISE-FALL, FALL-RISE, LEVEL) by expert listeners. The second was the fundamental frequency (F0) from the early, middle and late portion of each syllable. Both measures showed significant differences between the two language groups. 65% of the utterances from both groups were classified as either rising of falling. For the French children, these were divided equally into the rising and the falling categories, while 75% of those utterances for the English children were judged to have falling intonation. Proportions of the other three categories were not significantly different by language environment. In both languages, though, three-syllable utterances were more likely to have a complex contour than two-syllable ones. Analysis of the F0 patterns confirmed the perceptual assessment. Several aspects of the target languages help explain these intonational differences in prelinguistic babbling.

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.