This article discusses the acquisition of gender in Russian, focusing on some exceptional subclasses of nouns that display a mismatch between semantics and morphology. Experimental results from twenty-five Russian-speaking monolinguals (age 2 ; 6–4 ; 0) are presented and, within a cue-based approach to language acquisition, we argue that children rely on certain morphosyntactic micro-cues in the course of acquisition of semantic agreement. A discrepancy is observed in the acquisition of semantic agreement across the different noun classes, and this suggests that children are highly sensitive to fine distinctions in syntax and morphology and use detailed input information to make specific inferences concerning the gender of different noun classes. Furthermore, we argue that acquisition data may provide a more accurate account of how gender assignment proceeds in the mind of a speaker than has been traditionally assumed by gender assignment theories.

The purpose of these studies is to characterize children's conception of reversal and its relation to a reference state. A reversal is the move from one state to some prior state of affairs. For example, shoes that have been TIED can be UNTIED, parcels WRAPPED then UNWRAPPED, and dishes COVERED then UNCOVERED. The present studies were designed to find out how children (aged 1;0 to 5;0) describe reversals of action that restore objects to a prior, less constrained, state. In English, the prefix un- offers the most productive device for this, but, initially, children rely on a verb like open, on general purpose undo, and on particles like out and off, As they acquire un-, English-speaking children must learn that this prefix applies primarily to verbs for change-of-state, often for enclosing, covering and attaching. In German, there is no reversal prefix, but there are productive particles. German-speaking children also begin with a verb like open and then turn to verb particles on a course similar to that in English to express reversals.

In order to separate competence and performance factors in acquisition of knowledge of syntactic subjects, we audiotaped and analysed the spontaneous speech of 20 Portuguese-speaking two-year-olds in natural conversation with Portuguese-speaking adults. We separated the children into three groups based on Mean Length of Utterance in Words: 1·5–1·99; 2·0–2·99; 3·0–4·99. Our cross-sectional data demonstrated that Portuguese-speaking children increased their use of subjects from 28% in the lowest-MLUW group to 57% in the highest-MLUW group. The children in the highest-MLUW group almost perfectly matched the adult speakers in the study on every measure. The increase in children's use of subjects was primarily due to an increase in the use of pronominal subjects. A comparison between Portuguese- and English-speaking children suggests that adult competence about the status of subjects is present at the onset of combinatorial speech, as shown by differential production of subjects. Each group also experiences performance limitations, as shown by the increase in subject use as development proceeds.

Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs, parent-completed language development checklists) are a helpful tool to assess language in children who are unused to interaction with unfamiliar adults. Generally, CDIs are completed in written form, but in developing country settings parents may have insufficient literacy to complete them alone. We designed CDIs to assess language development in children aged 0;8 to 2;4 in two languages used in Coastal communities in Kenya. Measures of vocabulary, gestures, and grammatical constructions were developed using both interviews with parents from varying backgrounds, and vocabulary as well as grammatical constructions from recordings of children's spontaneous speech. The CDIs were then administered in interview format to over 300 families. Reliability and validity ranged from acceptable to excellent, supporting the use of CDIs when direct language testing is impractical, even when children have multiple caregivers and where respondents have low literacy levels.

This is the first study to report how children's language skills and mothers' book-reading strategies, measured at 2;0, predict mastery of word inflections at 3;0 and 5;0 in a sample of 66 Finnish children. Three theoretical models were tested on the longitudinal data using path analyses. The testing of the models suggests direct developmental continuity from producing words and multiword utterances on later inflectional growth, but indirect effects of maternal strategies on language outcomes. Moreover, mothers' complex expansions and questions are positively related, whereas labellings and corrections are negatively related, to children's concurrent and subsequent language skills. Finally, vocabulary size relates negatively to maternal attention regulation. When joint attention is easily built up in the dyad, mothers concentrate more on direct reading, which, together with the child's vocabulary, predicts mastery of inflections. In conclusion, the results can be viewed as support for a child-driven view on the future course of language acquisition.

Children are believed to construct their causal theories through talk and interaction, but with the exception of a few studies, little or nothing is known about how young children justify and build theories of the world together with same-age peers through naturally occurring interaction, Children's sensitivity to when a pair or group of interlocutors who interact frequently together feel that a justification is needed, is an index of developing pragmatic competence (Goetz & Shatz, 1999) and may be influenced by interactive goals and gender identity positioning. Studies suggest that salient contexts for justifications for young children are disagreement and control (e.g. Veneziano & Sinclair, 1995) but researchers have been less recognizant of ‘situations in which partners verbally assist in the construction of justifications as a means to maintain contact or create solidarity’ (Goetz & Shatz, 1999: 722) as contexts for justifications. The present study examined the spontaneously produced justification constructions in the naturally occurring free play of five friendship groups of preschool-aged children (aged from 3 ; 6 to 5 ; 4), in terms of the motivating context of the justification, marking of the causal relationship with a connective, and causal theories accessed in the talk. Partner expansion (validating justifications) was a salient motivating context for justifications, especially in the talk of friendship groups of girls, and seemed to privilege greater marking of the causal relationship with a connective and less arbitrary reasoning. One group of girls varied their use of validating justifications depending on the theme of play. Results are discussed in terms of the implications of use of validating justifications for children's causal theory building with peers, linguistic development, and pragmatic development.

This study provides experimental evidence for preschool children's competence in basic information structure, with particular attention to the notions of topic and focus. It investigates their mastery of structural and definiteness distinctions to encode the information status of discourse referents, and seeks to distinguish linguistic competence from cognitive development as the source for children's ‘errors’. Evidence comes from a story-telling experiment performed on 45 children acquiring French (between the ages of 2 ; 6·22 and 5 ; 6·15). The article demonstrates continuity between the child and adult systems of basic discourse representation. It further argues that children's definiteness errors are not due to a lack of knowledge of the adult rules of information encoding. Rather, such errors stem from cognitive limitations and from assuming a wider common ground than adults would.

Pronunciation variation is under-studied in infant-directed speech, particularly for consonants. Regressive place assimilation involves a word-final alveolar stop taking the place of articulation of a following word-initial consonant. We investigated pronunciation variation in word-final alveolar stop consonants in storybooks read by forty-eight mothers in adult-directed or infant-directed style to infants aged approximately 0;3, 0;9, 1;1, or 1;8. We focused on phonological environments where regressive place assimilation could occur, i.e., when the stop preceded a word-initial labial or velar consonant. Spectrogram, waveform, and perceptual evidence was used to classify tokens into four pronunciation categories: canonical, assimilated, glottalized, or deleted. Results showed a reliable tendency for canonical variants to occur in infant-directed speech more often than in adult-directed speech. However, the otherwise very similar distributions of variants across addressee and age group suggested that infants largely experience statistical distributions of non-canonical consonantal pronunciation variants that mirror those experienced by adults.

A number of researchers have argued that phonological constraints may influence the emergence and form of combinatorial speech in children. Donahue (1986) presented evidence that one child's consonant harmony constraint operated across word boundaries. This paper presents further evidence for the operation of word-level phonological constraints in multi-word utterances. Selection and avoidance patterns as well as her modifications of adult forms indicate the presence of a syllable sequencing constraint in this child's grammar: an initial syllable must begin with a consonant whose sonority value is not less than that of the following syllable. The same constraint governs the form of her early word combinations. The existence of evidence for the operation of word-level constraints in word combinations, it is pointed out, has consequences for how we interpret two-lexicon models of phonological development.

The study considers implications of our findings regarding pre-school acquisition of Hebrew inflectional morphology (Berman 1981). Children resolve ‘opacities’ by reference to various types of ‘paradigms’. These are related to the distinction between transient and more widespread deviations from prescriptive norms, in an attempt to account for interactions between child language and language change. While pre-school acquisition is crucially affected by peer input, the grammar is subsequently reshaped by orthography and by formal study, yielding a complex interaction between concrete vs. abstract bases of Hebrew linguistic competence. Further research is needed to examine when and how the peculiarly Semitic constructs of consonantal root plus morphological pattern are acquired.

Most children aged 1;6 to 2;0 begin to use utterances of two words or more. It is therefore important for child phonologists to consider the development of phonetic and phonological phenomena that characterize connected speech. The longitudinal case study reported here investigated three juncture types – assimilation, elision and liaison – in the speech of a typically-developing child between the ages of 2;4 and 3;4. Attempts at production of these adult juncture types occurred from the onset of two-word utterances. However, for some juncture types, the child still had to perfect the intergestural relationships and gestural articulations that the adult between-word junctures demand. This process of phonetic development was largely accomplished by the age of 3;4. With one exception, between-word junctures appear not to be the result of learned phonological rules or processes. The exception is liaison involving /r/, which did not occur until the child was three years old.

Three- and four-year-olds (N = 144) were introduced to novel labels by an English speaker and a foreign speaker (of Nordish, a made-up language), and were asked to endorse one of the speaker's labels. Monolingual English-speaking children were compared to bilingual children and English-speaking children who were regularly exposed to a language other than English. All children tended to endorse the English speaker's labels when asked ‘What do you call this?’, but when asked ‘What do you call this in Nordish?’, children with exposure to a second language were more likely to endorse the foreign label than monolingual and bilingual children. The findings suggest that, at this age, exposure to, but not necessarily immersion in, more than one language may promote the ability to learn foreign words from a foreign speaker.

Our previous research showed that Russian children commit fewer gender-agreement errors with diminutive nouns than with their simplex counterparts. Experiment 1 replicates this finding with Russian children (N=24, mean 3;7, range 2;10–4;6). Gender agreement was recorded from adjective usage as children described animal pictures given just their names, varying in derivational status (diminutive/simplex), novelty, and gender. Experiment 2 extends the gender-agreement elicitation methodology developed for Russian to Serbian, a language with similar morphosyntactic structure but considerably fewer diminutives in child-directed speech. Serbian children (N=22, mean age 3;8, range 3;0–4;1), exhibited an advantage for diminutive nouns of almost the same magnitude as the Russian children. The fact that the diminutive advantage was found in a language with a low frequency of diminutives in the input suggests that morphophonological homogeneity of word clusters and membership in dense neighbourhoods are important factors that contribute to the reduction of inflectional errors during language development.

Mother and child speech in two half-hour free play conversations of six pairs were analysed for 15 semantic roles such as AGENT and ACTION, and five additional syntactic categories such as negation. Children were taped at the beginning of word combinations (1; 7–2; 0) and again 3 to 6 months later. Mothers and children were similar to one another in the relative frequency with which they used the different semantic and syntactic categories. However, the mothers' use was stable, including a larger number of categories than the children and showing few shifts in relative frequency. Insofar as changes took place over time, it was the children who changed to become more like their mothers, both in the semantic roles present and in their relative frequency of use. These findings are interpreted as evidence against a Fine-Tuning Hypothesis to explain the content of mothers' speech to children. The role of discourse topic restrictions in limiting the distribution of semantic roles is discussed.

We report on an eye-tracking study that investigated four-year-old Cantonese-speaking children's online processing of subject and object relative clauses (RCs). Children's eye-movements were recorded as they listened to RC structures identifying a unique referent (e.g. “Can you pick up the horse that pushed the pig?”). Two RC types, classifier (CL) and ge3 RCs, were tested in a between-participants design. The two RC types differ in their syntactic analyses and frequency of occurrence, providing an important point of comparison for theories of RC acquisition and processing. A permutation analysis showed that the two structures were processed differently: CL RCs showed a significant object-over-subject advantage, whereas ge3 RCs showed the opposite effect. This study shows that children can have different preferences even for two very similar RC structures within the same language, suggesting that syntactic processing preferences are shaped by the unique features of particular constructions both within and across different linguistic typologies.

This study investigates three- to five-year-old children's interpretation of disjunction in sentences like ‘The dog reached the finish line before the turtle or the bunny’. English disjunction has a conjunctive interpretation in such sentences (‘The dog reached the finish line before the turtle and before the bunny’). This interpretation conforms with classical logic. Mandarin disjunction (‘huozhe’) can take scope over ‘before’ (‘zai … zhiqian’), so the same sentence can mean ‘The dog reached the finish line before the turtle or before the bunny (I don't know which)’. If children are guided by adult input in the acquisition of sentence meanings, English- and Mandarin-speaking children should assign different interpretations to such sentences. If children are guided by logical principles, then children acquiring either language should initially assign the conjunctive interpretation of disjunction. A truth-value judgment task was used to test this prediction and English- and Mandarin-speaking children were found to behave similarly.

We examined children's use of apology terms in parent–child discourse. Longitudinal data from 9 children (5 males, 4 females) between the ages of 1;2 and 6;1 were analysed. Before 2;0, the use of apology terms was rare. Thereafter, several developmental trends were noted including a decrease with age in directly elicited apologies and an increase in indirectly elicited apologies. With age children's apologies also became more elaborate. Children were exposed to apology terms primarily through apologies directed to them and, to a lesser degree, in talk about apologies. Our study documents young children's early mastery of an important pragmatic skill and identifies parents' role in its acquisition.

The effect of neighborhood density on optional infinitives was evaluated for typically developing (TD) children and children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Forty children, twenty in each group, completed two production tasks that assessed third person singular production. Half of the sentences in each task presented a dense verb, and half presented a sparse verb. Children's third person singular accuracy was compared across dense and sparse verbs. Results showed that the TD group was significantly less likely to use optional infinitives with dense, rather than sparse verbs. In contrast, the distribution of optional infinitives for the SLI group was independent of verb neighborhood density. Follow-up analyses showed that the lack of neighborhood density effect for the SLI group could not be attributed to heterogeneous neighborhood density effects or floor effects. Results were interpreted within the Optional Infinitive/Extended Optional Infinitive accounts for typical language development and SLI for English-speaking children.

This research evaluated the Polish child's capacity to comprehend aspect and tense distinctions realized by either prefixation or suffixation. Ten 2; 6 and ten 3; 6 children were given a picture–sentence matching task. Aspect picture sets contrasted completed with incompleted situations and sentences contrasted perfective with imperfective verbs differing by a prefix or a suffix. Tense picture sets portrayed either ongoing vs. anticipated action or results of action vs. anticipated action contrasts. Again sentences differed in verb forms either by prefixes or suffixes. The results showed that young children can pay attention to the beginnings of words as easily as to the ends of words and can understand a wide range of aspect and tense distinctions.