When they see a familiar object and an unfamiliar one, and are asked to select the referent of a novel label, children usually choose the unfamiliar object. We asked whether this ‘disambiguation effect’ reflects an expectation that each object has just one label (mutual exclusivity), or an expectation about the intent of the speaker who uses a novel label. In Study 1, when a speaker gazed at or pointed toward the familiar object in a novel–familiar pair, children aged 2 ; 6 (N=64) selected that object in response to a neutral request, but were much less likely to do so in response to a label request. In Study 2, when a speaker both gazed at and pointed toward the familiar object, toddlers (N=16) overwhelmingly selected the familiar object in response to a label request. The expectation that each object has just one label can lead children to discount some individual behavioral cues to a speaker's intent, though it can be overridden given a combination of pragmatic cues.

Based on Clark & Lucy's (1975) study of adult comprehension of different types of indirect requests, this study addresses the questions: ‘How well are children aged 4 to 7 able to understand these same indirect requests?’ and ‘How does the relation between request type and ease of comprehension compare from children to adults?’ Results showed: (1) these children are able to comprehend a wide variety of indirect requests; (2) there is a general developmental pattern of acquisition; (3) interrogative forms are more difficult than declarative forms; (4) conveyed negative requests are more difficult than corresponding conveyed positive requests; (5) children are heavily influenced by the surface polarity of the conveyed request; and (6) the relationship between request type and ease of comprehension is strikingly similar for both children and adults.

This study investigates the development of plural morphology in Jordanian Arab children, and explores the role of the predictability, transparency, productivity, and frequency of different plural forms in determining the trajectory that children follow in acquiring this complex inflectional system. The study also re-examines the development of the notion of default over several years. Sixty Jordanian children, equally divided among six age groups (three to eight years), completed an oral real-word pluralization task and a nonsense-word pluralization task. The findings indicate that feminine sound plurals are acquired before and extended to the other plural forms. Productivity and frequency seem to shape the acquisition patterns among younger children, but predictability becomes more critical at a later age. Younger children use the most productive plural as the default form, but older children tend to use two default forms based on frequency distributions in the adult language. The theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.

The following describes a study of the acquisition of ‘pragmatic’ structures by Italian children. PRAGMATICS refers to the study of the use of language in context, by real speakers and hearers in real situations. It therefore fails to meet the definition of ‘competence’ outlined by Chomsky, emphasizing the ideal speaker abstracted from particular situations, and perhaps for this reason has been neglected in psycholinguistic studies. However, there has been a renewed interest in pragmatics in recent semantic theory, and a number of proposals have been made regarding a formal representation for pragmatic structures. Three major positions can be distinguished, all of which in varying degrees separate pragmatics from the propositional content itself, as a set of procedures and assumptions for the appropriate use of propositions. Interpretive semanticists, such as Jackendoff (1972), place pragmatics entirely outside the syntactic component, in a separate and heterogeneous semantic component. Fillmore (1968) and Weinreich (1963) offer proposals for a separate ‘modality component’ which operates on a more articulated semantic structure. For example, in the sentence Could John have hit the ball?, the proposition ‘John hit the ball’ is spelled out in terms of the predicate ‘hit’, the two arguments, and the semantic relations holding among them. The modality component would contain simply a set of unanalysed symbols like QUESTION, CONDITIONAL and PAST PERFECT that are applied to the proposition. A third approach to pragmatics is offered in natural logic models like those of Parisi & Antinucci (1973) or Lakoff (forthcoming). In these models, as contrasted with the above modality component, all the meaning underlying a sentence is broken into minimal elements. Thus the above sentence is described not only with the nuclear proposition ‘John hit the ball’, but with a performative proposition describing the speaker's interrogative intention (i.e. ‘I ask you…’) and with various presuppositions1 describing the conditions that are necessary for the sentence to be appropriate. For example, instead of an unanalysed symbol for conditional, there is an ancillary proposition describing the fact that the central proposition is not necessarily true at time X. This latter approach was of more heuristic value for a developmental study of pragmatics because a representation is available for all the meaning underlying a given sentence. For example, the articulated presupposition ‘Proposition X is not necessarily true at time X’ is more easily translatable into psychological terms than an unanalysed symbol like ‘Conditional’.

Pronouns seem to be acquired in an asymmetrical way, where children confuse the meaning of pronouns with reflexives up to the age of six, but not vice versa. Children's production of the same referential expressions is appropriate at the age of four. However, response-based tasks, the usual means to investigate child language comprehension, are very demanding given children's limited cognitive resources. Therefore, they might affect performance. To assess the impact of the task, we investigated learners of Dutch (three- and four-year-olds) using both eye-tracking, a non-demanding on-line method, and a typical response-based task. Eye-tracking results show an emerging ability to correctly comprehend pronouns at the age of four. A response-based task fails to indicate this ability across age groups, replicating results of earlier studies. Additionally, biases seem to influence the outcome of the response-based task. These results add new evidence to the ongoing debate of the asymmetrical acquisition of pronouns and reflexives and suggest that there is less of an asymmetry than previously assumed.

This study examines the perfective past tense of Greek in an elicited production and an acceptability judgment task testing 35 adult native speakers and 154 children in six age groups (age range: 3 ; 5 to 8 ; 5) on both existing and novel verb stimuli. We found a striking contrast between sigmatic and non-sigmatic perfective past tense forms. Sigmatic forms (which have a segmentable perfective affix (-s-) in Greek) were widely generalized to different kinds of novel verbs in both children and adults and were overgeneralized to existing non-sigmatic verbs in children's productions. By contrast, non-sigmatic forms were only extended to novel verbs that were similar to existing non-sigmatic verbs, and overapplications of non-sigmatic forms to existing sigmatic verbs were extremely rare. We argue that these findings are consistent with dual-mechanism accounts of morphology.

We report here on a series of elicited production experiments that investigate the production of indirect object and oblique relative clauses by monolingual child learners of English and Korean. Taken together, the results from the two languages point toward a pair of robust asymmetries: children manifest a preference for subject relative clauses over indirect object relative clauses, and for direct object relative clauses over oblique relative clauses. We consider various possible explanations for these preferences, of which the most promising seems to involve the requirement that the referent of the head noun be easily construed as what the relative clause is about.

Most processes in child phonology have as their domain a single word or a smaller chunk of phonological material. Processes that involve the interaction of two or more words have never been examined. In a diary study of the speech of one child acquiring English, there were eight between-word processes. All were optional and occurred in fairly restricted environments. Most of the processes were of short duration. Consequences for the study of child phonology are discussed.

This study experimentally investigated the hypothesis that some of young children's overextensions are analogic expressions by comparing children's labelling of objects in a naming task to their labelling of the same objects in a play situation. All of the 11 children (1; 8–2; 4) renamed substitute objects during pretend play. Criteria were established which identified 27% of children's renamings as analogic. Analysis of children's choice of substitute objects in pretend play showed that older children's (2; 2–2; 4) selections were influenced by their previous naming of the objects. In addition, both younger and older children tended to choose more functionally similar objects over more physically similar objects although ambiguous objects were renamed most often. Records collected by mothers for one week provided further evidence that children spontaneously produce analogic extensions.

This research addresses the question of why some children are disposed to making a large number of pronoun case errors and others are not. The answer proposed is that when pronoun paradigm building outstrips the development of INFL, children become especially vulnerable to erring in the choice of pronominal word form, resulting in pronoun case error. On the other hand, when pronoun paradigm building proceeds more conservatively, the risk of error is reduced. The spontaneous sentence production of children observed in naturalistic caregiver – child interaction from a cross-section of 44 children (2;0–4;0) is used to support this proposal. The data show that pronoun case error was minimal among children who had strong INFL. However, among children with weak INFL there was a wide range of variation, some children making many errors and others making none. Analysis of variance confirmed that this variation was strongly related to the dispersion of production attempts across an extended pronoun paradigm, such that, the fewer cells attempted, the lower the error rate. These findings show that pronoun case errors are not an inevitable result of grammatical development, but may conceivably be avoided altogether if paradigm building proceeds at a rate commensurate with the child's development of INFL.

This study investigated the form of infinitival sentences produced by young children and their knowledge of the control properties of this sentence form. Twenty-five children between the ages of 3;7 and 5;4 participated in a story completion task designed to elicit infinitive sentences and in an act-out comprehension task. Although the infinitive form was productive for even the youngest children in this study, development of this form was not complete even for the five-year-olds, nor did any child demonstrate adult knowledge of control. In addition, two competing claims regarding order of acquisition (that of Limber, 1973, and Hyams, 1985) were evaluated.

Recent studies have suggested that cultures vary in subtle ways in the talk about talk that children hear and learn to produce. Twenty-two three-year-old children and their families in respectively Oslo, Norway and Cambridge, Massachusetts were observed during mealtime with the aim of identifying talk-focused talk. The analysis distinguished talk about (a) language per se, (b) discourse management, and (c) former conversations and use of reported speech. No category of talk-focused talk appeared exclusively in either community, and the frequency of such talk was similar across these. The Oslo families talked more often about language per se and their talk-focused conversations typically had a question–answer form. Talk about talk appeared more often within narratives in Oslo and within explanations in Cambridge. A second analysis compared talk-focused talk at home with such talk at school, suggesting that talk about language per se appeared more often at school across the two communities.

Substantial individual differences exist in regard to type and amount of experience with variable speech resulting from foreign or regional accents. Whereas prior experience helps with processing familiar accents, research on how experience with accented speech affects processing of unfamiliar accents is inconclusive, ranging from perceptual benefits to processing disadvantages. We examined how experience with accented speech modulates mono- and bilingual children's (mean age: 9;10) ease of speech comprehension for two unfamiliar accents in German, one foreign and one regional. More experience with regional accents helped children repeat sentences correctly in the regional condition and in the standard condition. More experience with foreign accents did not help in either accent condition. The results suggest that type and amount of accent experience co-determine processing ease of accented speech.

The study examined whether the use of superordinate terms in children's definitions was predicted by relevance theory. Two hundred and six children aged five to ten years gave definitions for 16 basic-level words and four superordinate words from natural kind and artefact semantic domains. Superordinate terms were used more frequently when they supported more inferences. This was evidenced by their more frequent use in natural kind than in artefact domains, and more frequent use when the superordinate was itself defined by a semantically complex expression. When used, superordinates also usually occurred at the beginning of the definitional expression. It is argued that these findings reflect the speaker's intention to achieve optimal relevance, that is, to achieve maximum contextual effects with the least processing effort.

This study attempts to determine whether subject–auxiliary inversion occurs in yes–no questions before wh-questions and whether non-inversion errors (when daddy will come home?) are a characteristic feature of the acquisition of wh-questions. The data consist of the yes–no and wh-questions of 18 children, aged 2;5 to 3;0 with an mlu range of 2.66–4.26. Findings do not support previous claims that inversion is acquired in yes–no questions before wh-questions. Rather, a significant number of children were found to use an optional inversion rule in both question types. This fact appears to account for the finding that non-inversion errors are a characteristic feature of the acquisition of wh-questions.

Seventeen preschool (age range 2;10–3;6), 26 kindergarten (age range 5;5–6;7), and 26 fourth-grade (age range 9;5–10;5) children's knowledge structures were examined with a word association task and a match-to-sample picture task to determine whether or not children used slot-filler categories as a mediating structure between event-based and taxonomic knowledge structures, as proposed by Nelson (1985, 1986). In general, preschool children were able to provide event-based, but not slot-filler or taxonomic, relations; kindergarten children were able to provide event-based or slot-filler relations, but very few taxonomic relations; and fourth-grade children were able to provide all three relations. These findings support Nelson's hypothesis that taxonomic knowledge structures are derived from event-based knowledge structures with the aid of slot-filler categories.

Children in grades 1–3 (ages 6–9) were asked to retell and explain a series of riddles. The scoring system was developed to differentiate levels of competence. Ability to recall riddles was not found to be predictive of ability to explain them. Three cognitive factors seemed to determine level of riddle competence. Level of competence was NOT clearly related to age. Analysis of riddles yields descriptive attributes that distinguish easy from difficult riddles. Implications concern the relationship of riddle competence to reading ability and metalinguistic facility.

Three experiments with children between 5 and 7 years are described. It is shown that nominal predication of an unknown word by a superordinate term enables young children to make appropriate inferences concerning its attributes. The provision of distinguishing attributes also permits the child to differentiate the unfamiliar word from hyponyms of the superordinate. The results are discussed in relation to semantic development and reasoning in the young child.

Infants learning languages with long consonants, or geminates, have been found to ‘overselect’ and ‘overproduce’ these consonants in early words and also to commonly omit the word-initial consonant. A production study with thirty Italian children recorded at 1;3 and 1;9 strongly confirmed both of these tendencies. To test the hypothesis that it is the salience of the medial geminate that detracts attention from the initial consonant we conducted three experiments with 11-month-old Italian infants. We first established baseline word-form recognition for untrained familiar trochaic disyllables and then tested for word-form recognition, separately for words with geminates and singletons, after changing the initial consonant to create nonwords from both familiar and rare forms. Familiar words with geminates were recognized despite the change, words with singletons were not. The findings indicate that a feature occurring later in the word affects initial consonant production and perception, which supports the whole-word phonology model.