Recent studies on the acquisition of semantics have argued that knowledge of the universal quantifier is adult-like throughout development. However, there are domains where children still exhibit non-adult-like universal quantification, and arguments for the early mastery of relevant semantic knowledge do not explain what causes such non-adult-like interpretations. The present study investigates Japanese four- and five-year-old children's atypical universal quantification in light of the development of cognitive control. We hypothesized that children's still-developing cognitive control contributes to their atypical universal quantification. Using a combined eye-tracking and interpretation task together with a non-linguistic measure of cognitive control, we revealed a link between the achievement of adult-like universal quantification and the development of flexible perspective-switch. We argue that the development of cognitive control is one of the factors that contribute to children's processing of semantics.

Whenever children hear a novel word, the context supplies information about its meaning. One way children may cope with so much information is to use whatever seems to make sense, given their prior knowledge and beliefs, while ignoring or quickly forgetting the rest. This work examined if and how children's beliefs about word meanings may affect their use of contrastive linguistic information in the input in word learning. In Study 1, some 3- and 4-year-olds were introduced to a novel material or shape name and heard it contrasted with familiar words. Others merely heard the novel word used for referring to an object. These children were then tested to determine what they had learned about their new word meaning. In Study 2, another group of 3-and 4-year-olds were asked to name the materials and shapes used for introducing these novel terms. Children made use of linguistic contrast only in some situations. They benefited more when the novel term did not overlap much in denotation with any terms commonly known by 3-and 4-year-olds. These results suggest that children can use information in the input very efficiently in learning a term for an as-yet-unnamed category, but not in learning a term similar in denotation to a word they already know. Thus, the results are consistent with the claim that children believe every word has a unique denotation.

The present study concerned the acquisition of double-object, bi-transitive sentences which can be expressed in either BASIC (S-V-DO-to-IO) or TRANSFORM (S-V-IO-DO) constructions. Three-, four-, and five-year-old subjects were tested on comprehension and production of these two alternative forms, investigating the distribution of Basic and Transform sentences in acquisition, and also the effect of prototypicality of the described event on performance. The results showed that the Basic structure was earlier in acquisition, with the Transform appearing later and, at first, only in descriptions of the more prototypical events. Overall, the more prototypical an event, the more competent the children were in comprehension and production and the better able they were to handle the more difficult Transform sentences. Decreased prototypicality resulted in lower performance and greater dependence on the Basic as opposed to the Transform bi-transitives. The findings are discussed within the framework of a general theory of language performance being developed by the first author.

Verbal/vocal interactions of three Japanese mother–child dyads were examined when the children were 1;0, 1;2 to 1;3, 1;6 to 1;7, and 1;8 to 1;9 to determine whether mothers provide information which may facilitate the elaboration of child lexical forms during the transition from the prelinguistic to the linguistic period. Mothers were likely to reproduce only the child's word-like utterances, both well- and ill-formed. This provided an opportunity for the child's ill-formed word-like utterance to be contrasted with an immediate maternal response. This finding, along with results showing within-child variability of lexical forms, suggested that maternal contrastive replies 1) signal errors to the child (cf. Saxton, 1997), and 2) may promote the child's selection and stabilization of production alternatives which are more accurate. Maternal reproductive responding presumably originated in their tendency to seek content-oriented communication, as was reflected in mother's growing inclination to continue verbal interactions following the child's non-word-like vocalizations.

This study presents an analysis of children's spontaneous production of words and gestures during an experimental symbol learning task. Namy & Waxman (1998) previously reported that children aged 1;6 interpreted novel arbitrary words (e.g. blicket) and manual gestures (e.g. a dropping motion) as names for object categories (e.g. fruit) but that at 2;2, children interpreted words as names more readily than gestures. Based on this finding and other observational evidence of gesture use, it has been suggested that the younger infants have an initial general symbolic capacity that encompasses both words and gestures. Over time, as infants acquire greater experience with language, words begin to take on a greater priority in the infant's communicative repertoire. The current study examines this hypothesis by analyzing children's spontaneous production of the novel symbols in Namy & Waxman's original task. At 1;6, children rarely produced either the novel words or gestures. At 2;2, children frequently produced both symbolic forms; however, words were produced in a referential manner while gestures were produced in a non-referential manner. These findings are consistent with the argument that over time, words supplant gestures as a symbolic medium.

Children with language disorders have particular difficulty with verbs, but when this difficulty emerges is unknown. We examined syntactic (transitive, intransitive, ditransitive) and semantic (manner, result) features of two-year-olds’ verb vocabularies, contrasting late talkers and typically developing children to look for early differences in verb vocabulary. We conducted a retrospective analysis of parent-reported expressive vocabulary from the Language Development Survey (N = 564, N(LT) = 62) (Rescorla, 1989). Verbs were coded for the presence or absence of each syntactic and semantic feature. Binomial mixed-effects regressions revealed the effect of feature on children's knowledge and whether feature interacted with group classification. Our results revealed mostly similarities between late talkers and typically developing children. All children's vocabularies showed a bias against verbs that occur in ditransitive frames. One feature showed a difference between groups: late talkers showed a bias against manner verbs that typically developing children did not.

We hypothesize that the conceptual relation between a verb and its direct object can make a sentence easier (‘the cat is eating some food’) or harder (‘the cat is eating a sock’) to parse and understand. If children's limited performance systems contribute to the ungrammatical brevity of their speech, they should perform better on sentences that require fewer processing resources: children should imitate the constituents of sentences with highly predictable direct objects at a higher rate than those from sentences with less predictable objects. In Experiment 1, 24 two-year-olds performed an elicited imitation task and confirmed that prediction for all three major constituents (subject, verb, direct object). In Experiment 2, 23 two-year-olds performed both an elicited imitation task and a sticker placement task (in which they placed a sticker on the pictured subject of the sentence after hearing and imitating the sentence). Children imitated verbs more often from predictable than unpredictable sentences, but not subjects or objects. Children's inclusion of constituents is affected by the conceptual relations among those constituents as well as by task characteristics.

The goal of this study was to examine the influence of part-word phonotactic probability/neighborhood density on word learning by preschool children with normal vocabularies that varied in size. Ninety-eight children (age 2 ; 11–6 ; 0) were taught consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) nonwords orthogonally varying in the probability/density of the CV (i.e. body) and VC (i.e. rhyme). Learning was measured via picture naming. Children with the lowest expressive vocabulary scores showed no effect of either CV or VC probability/density, although floor effects could not be ruled out. In contrast, children with low or high expressive vocabulary scores demonstrated sensitivity to part-word probability/density with the nature of the effect varying by group. Children with the highest expressive vocabulary scores displayed yet a third pattern of part-word probability/density effects. Taken together, word learning by preschool children was influenced by part-word probability/density but the nature of this influence appeared to depend on the size of the lexicon.

This study assesses children's understanding of the Italian modal verbs dovere (must) and potere (may) in their dual function of qualification of the speaker's beliefs (epistemic modality) and behaviour regulation (deontic modality). 192 children and 60 adults participated in the experiment. Children aged 3;0 to 9;2 were presented with two tasks: one assessed their understanding of modal expressions in the epistemic domain – looking for an object by following the information contained in a sentence; the other assessed their understanding of modal expressions in the deontic domain – acting according to obligations, permissions and prohibitions in the context of a game. Half of the subjects carried out the tasks in a single-sentence format and half carried out the tasks in a double-sentence format. In the single-sentence format the subjects had to follow the directions supplied by a modalized sentence; in the double-sentence format they had to follow the directions supplied by the sentence containing the stronger modal verb. Our results show that the understanding of deontic modal forms precedes the understanding of epistemic modal forms and that a full understanding of the strength of different modal forms is achieved only at eight years.

This note attempts to clarify the early acquisition of the interrogative system, with data from Serbo-Croatian. The subject is approached from an angle that has hitherto not received sufficient treatment: adult-child interaction in direct communication. The process of question acquisition was observed in a first-born pair of dizygotic twins – a girl, Jasmina, and a boy, Danko – between I; I and 3; 0, the observation beginning a month prior to the time when the children first began to produce questions. The material was transcribed during weekly two-hour sessions in the home of the subjects.

Several studies investigated preschoolers’ ability to compute scalar and ad-hoc implicatures, but only one compared children's performance with both kinds of implicature with the same task, a picture selection task. In Experiment 1 (N = 58, age: 4;2-6;0), we first show that the truth value judgment task, traditionally employed to investigate children's pragmatic ability, prompts a rate of pragmatic responses comparable to the picture selection task. In Experiment 2 (N = 141, age: 3;8-9;2) we used the picture selection task to compare scalar and ad-hoc implicatures and linked the ability to derive these implicatures to some cognitive and linguistic measures. We found that four- and five-year-olds children performed better on ad-hoc than on scalar implicatures. Furthermore, we found that morphosyntactic competence was associated with success in both kinds of implicatures, while performance on mental state reasoning was positively associated with success on scalar but not ad-hoc implicatures.

This study examined the on-line processing of French sentences in a grammaticality judgment experiment. Three age groups of French children (mean age: 6;8, 8;6 and 10;10 years) and a group of adults were asked to detect grammatical violations as quickly as possible. Three factors were studied: the violation type: agreement violations (number and gender) vs. word order violations; the violation position: early vs. late in the sentence; the target type of the violations: intra vs. interphrasal. An example of an early interphrasal verbal agreement violation follows: ‘Chaque semaine la voisine remplissent le frigo après avoir fait les courses au marché’ (Every week the neighbour fill the fridge after shopping at the market). The main developmental results were the following: not surprisingly, children were always slower than adults in the detection of grammatical violations. At each age level, morphological violations were more rapidly detected than word order violations. Each age group was faster at judging sentences with later occurring violations and the position effect was especially strong in the youngest groups. Finally, intraphrasal violations were more rapidly detected than interphrasal ones, this effect being observed only in the oldest groups (i.e. 10;10 years and adults). The results were compared to previous on-line data obtained in modern Greek (Kail & Diakogiorgi, 1998) showing strong similarities, even though Greek is a very rich morphological language. These results are discussed within the framework of the Competition Model, outlining the necessity to incorporate new processing constraints into the model.

This paper addresses the question of whether the rate and patterns of pronoun case error are influenced by the composition of an individual pronoun's paradigm. Twenty-nine children, aged 2;6 to 4;0 were audiotaped for two 1-hour sessions, interacting with their primary caregivers engaged in free play, book reading and family album viewing. It was found that her was overextended for she at a significantly higher rate than him for he and them for they, providing evidence of a ‘double-cell’ effect that increases the incidence of error in the feminine pronoun. It was also found that the overextension of nominative forms (e.g. he for him), were antagonistic to the more frequently occurring type of overextension, objective for nominative (e.g. him for he). These findings indicate that the composition of a pronoun's paradigm influenced the patterns of pronoun case error observed.

Children aged 2;11 to 8;3 sang informally, once in the presence of their infant sibling and once when the infant was out of view. Paired excerpts from 22 children were presented to adult listeners, who were required to identify the infant-directed excerpt in each pair. Listeners' accuracy was above chance levels but below what would be expected for mothers' singing in comparable contexts. Children altered their singing style in the infant's presence by singing at a higher pitch level and with a different vocal quality.

Previous studies of children's comprehension of compound nouns show that three-year-olds can identify the appropriate referent for a compound when shown picture arrays that include salient distractors. The four studies presented here investigate comprehension of one kind of compound, metaphoric compounds (i.e. noun–noun compounds in which one noun expresses similarity to another object, as in catfish). Forty-four three-year-olds, 45 five-year-olds and 22 adults were shown a series of picture arrays and were asked to identify referents of various types of metaphoric compounds. The arrays included target pictures that had metaphoric resemblances based on shape (e.g. bug shaped like a stick) or on colour/pattern (e.g. shells with black and white stripes, like a zebra). Results showed that three- and five-year-olds can comprehend shape-based metaphoric compounds such as stick-bug, even when faced with salient distractors (e.g. a stick, a bug next to a stick). The younger children had some difficulty with colour-based compounds, such as zebra-shells. Overall, five-year-olds outperformed three-year-olds but performed significantly less well than adults. However, even at age 3, children did not show a general expectation to interpret the compounds literally.

Preschoolers’ vocabulary acquisition sets the stage for later reading ability and school achievement. This study examined the role of socioeconomic status (SES) and the quality of the home environment of seventy-seven Chilean majority and Mapuche minority families from low and lower-middle-class backgrounds in explaining individual differences in vocabulary acquisition of their three-and-a-half-year-old children. Additionally, we investigated whether the relation between SES and receptive and expressive vocabulary was mediated by the quality of the home environment as the Family Investment Model suggests. The quality of the home environment significantly predicted receptive and expressive vocabulary above and beyond ethnicity, SES, parental caregiver status, and quantity of daycare. Furthermore, the quality of the home environment mediated the relation between SES and expressive and receptive vocabulary acquisition.

Auxiliary syntax is recognized to be one of the more complex aspects of language that children must acquire. However, there is much disagreement among researchers concerning children's early understanding of auxiliaries, with some researchers advocating a relatively abstract grammar as the basis for auxiliary syntax, while others view the acquisition of auxiliary syntax as the gradual accumulation of linguistic knowledge, initially tied to individual lexical items. To investigate the status of children's early knowledge of auxiliary syntax, two studies were carried out. In study 1, 28 children (M=3;1) were tested for their use of the auxiliaries BE and HAVE in declaratives, while in study 2, 19 children (M=3;3) were tested for their use of these auxiliaries in questions. Although overall error rates were low, there were differences between BE and HAVE in the proportion and types of errors observed in declaratives and questions, and some individual children showed very high error rates. The implications of these findings for different models of auxiliary syntax in children's early utterances are discussed.

This study investigates the developmental trajectory of relative clauses (RCs) in Mandarin-learning children's speech. We analyze the spontaneous production of RCs by four monolingual Mandarin-learning children (0;11 to 3;5) and their input from a longitudinal naturalistic speech corpus (Min, 1994). The results reveal that in terms of the syntactic role of the head noun in the matrix clause, isolated noun phrase RCs dominate, followed by those that modify the subject or object of the matrix clauses and predicate nominal relatives. This pattern differs from those observed in English (Diessel & Tomasello, 2000), German (Brandt, Diessel & Tomasello, 2008), and Japanese (Ozeki & Shirai, 2007). Regarding the syntactic role of the head noun inside the RC (i.e. subject, object, or oblique relatives), the early RCs are dominated by object relatives. This pattern also differs from those observed in English and Japanese. We propose a multifactorial usage-based learning account for the developmental patterns.

Acquisition of the words this and thatwas tested by a comprehension and a production task with children of ages 4 and 7. In the comprehension task, children had to choose one of two toys requested by the experimenter. Child and experimenter were seated either side by side or facing one another. It was expected that children would first learn the spatial contrast between the two words and then learn to apply it from the speaker's point of view, according to developmental stages similar to those found in other studies of spatial non-egocentrism. The prediction was confirmed, but comparison with the results of de Villiers & de Villiers (1974) suggests an alternative theoretical analysis, in which non-egocentrism is not necessary for correct use of this and that. A second prediction, that performance would be better on the unmarked word that, was not confirmed for the side-by-side condition. In the production task, only 2 of the 60 children violated the restriction that this can refer only to near objects.