This study explores different frequency effects on children's interpretations of novel noun–noun compounds (e.g. egg bag as ‘bag FOR eggs’). We investigated whether four- to five-year-olds and adults use their knowledge of related compounds and their modifier–head relations (e.g. sandwich bag (FOR) or egg white (PART-OF)) when explaining the meaning of novel compounds and/or whether they are affected by overall frequency of modifier–head relations in their vocabulary. Children's interpretations were affected by their experience with relations in compounds with the same head, but not by overall relation frequency. Adults' interpretations were affected by their experience with relations in compounds with the same modifier, suggesting that children and adults use similar but different knowledge to interpret compounds. Furthermore, only children's interpretations revealed an overuse of visually perceivable relations.

This study explores the question of whether maternal gestures facilitate aspects of the linguistic or communicative behaviour of young children. Four children aged 1; 4 were videotaped playing with their mothers in an unconstrained free condition, and then again in an ungestured condition in which mothers were instructed not to use their hands while interacting with their children. Results from the two conditions of our study show that though children tended to produce attentive responses when they had observed a gesture, these reponses were not necessarily more appropriate to the interaction than responses not preceded by maternal gesture. We conclude that maternal gestures have more of a role in maintaining attention and the flow of interaction for young children than they do in providing specific cues to the grammar the child is acquiring.

Three investigations of pre-school children's comprehension of younger and older are discussed. The results suggest that children focus on height (or the lack of the same) in their initial hypotheses about the meanings of the terms, ignoring age and/or function cues. The results also suggest that the acquisition of antonyms which may be characterized as marked–unmarked is not necessarily characterized by the child equating the meaning of the marked and unmarked terms prior to learning the correct meaning of the marked term. These findings are discussed in terms of recent theorizing about lexical-meaning acquisition.

Object relative clauses have traditionally been thought to be more difficult than subject relative clauses in child English. However, recent studies as well as Japanese data show contradictory results. This study disclosed preschool children's superior performance on object relative clauses in Japanese; however, this dominance disappeared for the children who could use both the nominative and accusative case markers as cues for the comprehension of single-argument sentences. Assuming a filler–gap dependency for the relative clause formation, we suggest that there is no difference in the difficulty between subject and object relative clauses in the grammar of Japanese-speaking children.

We propose (contra Hyams, 1986) that the optional subject phenomenon in early child language arises because children have not yet acquired the morphological elements (primarily modals and tense) necessary to distinguish Subject-Taking (ST) verbs (e.g. finite verbs) from their non-Subject-Taking (NST) counterparts (e.g. infinitives). Unaware of this distinction, children are able only to observe that verbs sometimes occur with subjects and sometimes without. We show that our proposal makes a number of developmental predictions which we then test with the help of longitudinal data from three children. We conclude that: (i) There is no systematic morphological distinction between ST and NST verbs during the optional subject stage (OSS). (2) The emergence of the distinction between ST and NST verbs is gradual rather than sudden. (3) There is variation from child to child in terms of which morphologically-defined subclass of verbs is first recognized as subject-taking. (4) There is no link between the emergence of modals or contracted copulas and the end of the OSS.

An investigation was made of the episodic structure of maternal speech to young children during a free-play session. The findings indicate that maternal speech was organized so as to provide a high degree of redundancy with regard to the referential component of speech. The beginning of episodes, in which the same object was repeatedly referred to, was clearly marked; furthermore speech inside episodes with a common referent was highly repetitive. All this suggests that maternal speech is organized in a way that increases the predictability in the child's language environment.

Three- and four-year-olds participated in a referential communication task wherein they requested stickers from a knowledgeable or ignorant adult to complete a card. Following inadequate initial requests children were provided with three different feedback types: goal substitution (i.e. an incorrect sticker was provided), explicit statement of misunderstanding (‘I don't know which one you mean’), and vague feedback (‘Huh?’). Preschoolers' initial statements revealed sensitivity to the listener's perspective: more descriptors were provided when the listener did not have visual access to the card. Although listener's knowledge did not affect children's repair statements following feedback, the feedback type did: goal substitution elicited more repairs that included new descriptors, whereas vague responses elicited more repetition of initial requests than other feedback types. Children's age and verbal skills were related to the specific repair strategies used. Results demonstrate that preschoolers' use of cues from a conversational partner depends on the type of communicative task.

This study aimed to examine the influence of the complexity of the story-book on caregiver extra-textual talk (i.e., interactions beyond text reading) during shared reading with preschool-age children. Fifty-three mother–child dyads (3;00–4;11) were video-recorded sharing two ostensibly similar picture-books: a simple story (containing no false belief) and a complex story (containing a false belief central to the plot, which provided content that was more challenging for preschoolers to understand). Book-reading interactions were transcribed and coded. Results showed that the complex stories facilitated more extra-textual talk from mothers, and a higher quality of extra-textual talk (as indexed by linguistic richness and level of abstraction). Although the type of story did not affect the number of questions mothers posed, more elaborative follow-ups on children's responses were provided by mothers when sharing complex stories. Complex stories may facilitate more and linguistically richer caregiver extra-textual talk, having implications for preschoolers’ developing language abilities.

Evidence from experimental studies of Spanish children's production of determiners reveals that they pay more attention to phonological cues present in nouns than to natural semantics when assigning gender to determiners (Pérez-Pereira, 1991). This experimental work also demonstrated that Spanish children are more likely to produce the correct determiner when given a noun with phonological cues which suggest it is masculine, and more likely to assign masculine gender to nouns with ambiguous cues. In this paper, we investigate the phonological cues available to children and seek to explore the possibility that differential frequency in the linguistic input explains the priority given to masculine forms when children are faced with ambiguous novel items. A connectionist model of determiner production was incrementally trained on a lexicon of determiner–noun phrases taken from parental speech in a longitudinal study of a child between the ages of 1;7 and 2;11 (López Ornat, Fernandez, Gallo & Mariscal, 1994) preserving the type and token frequency information. An analysis of the database of parental productions revealed that while regular feminine nouns were slightly more frequent than regular masculine nouns, irregular masculine nouns outnumbered irregular feminine nouns by roughly 2 to 1. On the basis of this, we made the prediction that as the training lexicon builds up, the network will perform better overall on masculine determiners than would be predicted from their forms alone and will tend to assign masculine gender to ambiguous novel nouns in a test set. The findings indicate that, at least in the case of Spanish gender agreement for determiners and nouns, a general associative learning mechanism can account for important characteristics of the acquisition process seen in children.

This on-line study investigates the processing of word order by 30 French children (6;6, 8;6, 10;6) and 10 adults. Its main objective is to show that the privileged status granted to ‘canonical SVO sentences’ is inadequate to account for the on-line processing of pronominal utterances in spoken French. Using a word monitoring task, we showed that word order (NVN vs NNV): (1) is a significant factor in sentences containing no clitic pronoun; (2) stops being significant when sentences contain either one or two clitic pronouns. These results suggest that processing complexity depends upon co-reference (‘linear’, ‘crossed’ or ‘embedding’) assignment constraints rather than upon word order per se. We conclude that, in French, word-order processing always interacts with acceptability considerations provided by cliticization.

Although cognitive precursors of language production have received considerable attention, the relationship of cognitive development to language comprehension development remains unexplored. In the present research, the relationship of object permanence and classification skills to receptive, as well as expressive, language development was investigated in infants between 0; 9 and 1; 3. Results indicated that object permanence, classification, and parent–child verbal interaction ratings were about equally related to language comprehension functioning. No prerequisite stage of object permanence functioning could be discerned. On the other hand, object permanence was more strongly related to language production than were classification and verbal interaction. Furthermore, it appeared that a minimum of Stage 5 object permanence functioning was necessary prior to the onset of language production.

The aim of this study was to examine (a) the development of vocabulary and grammar in children with family-risk (FR) of dyslexia and their peers with no such risk (NoFR) between ages 1;6 and 6;0, and (b) whether FR-status exerted an effect on the direction of temporal relationships between these two constructs. Groups were assessed at seven time-points using standardised tests and parental reports. Results indicated that although FR and NoFR children had a similar development in the earlier years, the FR group appeared to perform significantly more poorly on vocabulary at the end of the preschool period. Results showed no significant effect of FR status on the cross-lagged relations between lexical and grammatical skills, suggesting a similar developmental pattern of cross-domain relations in both groups. However, FR status seemed to have a significantly negative association with vocabulary and grammar scores at age 6;0, resulting in language outcomes in favour of NoFR children.

In this study we sought to identify profiles of talk during Head Start preschool mealtime conversations involving teachers and students. Videos of 44 Head Start classrooms’ lunch interactions were analyzed for the ratio of teacher–child talk and amount of academic vocabulary, and then coded for instances of academic/food, social/personal, and management talk to highlight the degree of hybridity of talk within this unique setting. Cluster analysis revealed four distinct patterns of teacher–child mealtime interactions in 44 Head Start preschool classrooms: classroom discourse, home discourse, hybrid-low, and hybrid-high. Multilevel models further demonstrated a relationship among these clusters of teacher–child interactions and children's end-of-year expressive vocabulary scores controlling for ratio of teacher–child talk and pre-test scores. Children in classrooms displaying a hybrid style of mealtime discourse made the greatest gains on measures of expressive vocabulary in contrast to their peers in classrooms displaying other discourse styles.

In a longitudinal study, 17 parent–child dyads were observed during free-play when the children were 1;0, 1;6, and 2;0. Parents' labelling input in the verbal and gestural modalities was coded at each session, and parents completed a vocabulary checklist for their children at each visit. We analysed how the frequency of labelling in the verbal and gestural modalities changed across observation points and how changes in parental input related to children's vocabulary development. As a group, parents' verbal labelling remained constant across sessions, but gestural labelling declined at 2;0. However, there are notable individual differences in parental trajectories in both modalities. Parents whose verbal labelling frequency increased over time had children whose vocabulary grew more slowly than those whose labelling frequency decreased, remained constant, or peaked at 1;6. There were few systematic relations between patterns of parental gesturing and children's vocabulary development. Parents' verbal and gestural labelling patterns also appeared dissociable. However, parents' words and gestures were correlated when their children were 1;6, suggesting that gestures serve an important bootstrapping function at a critical point in children's vocabulary development.

This study explores the possibility that early word segmentation is aided by infants’ tendency to segment words with repeated syllables (‘reduplication’). Twenty-four nine-month-olds were familiarized with passages containing one novel reduplicated word and one novel non-reduplicated word. Their central fixation times in response to these as well as new reduplicated and non-reduplicated words introduced at test showed that familiarized reduplicated words were segmented better than familiarized non-reduplicated words. These results demonstrate that infants are predisposed to segment words with repeated phonological elements, and suggest that register-specific words in infant-directed speech may have evolved in response to this learning bias.

P. Bloom's (1990) data on subject omission are often taken as strong support for the view that child language can be explained in terms of full competence coupled with processing limitations in production. This paper examines whether processing limitations in learning may provide a more parsimonious explanation of the data without the need to assume full competence. We extended P. Bloom’s study by using a larger sample (12 children) and measuring subject omission phenomena in three developmental phases. The results revealed a Verb Phrase-length effect consistent with that reported by P. Bloom. However, contrary to the predictions of the processing limitations account, the proportion of overt subjects that were pronominal increased with developmental phase. The data were simulated with MOSAIC, a computational model that learns to produce progressively longer utterances as a function of training. MOSAIC was able to capture all of the effects reported by P. Bloom through a resource-limited distributional analysis of child-directed speech. Since MOSAIC does not have any built-in linguistic knowledge, these results show that the phenomena identified by P. Bloom do not constitute evidence for underlying competence on the part of the child. They also underline the need to develop more empirically grounded models of the way that processing limitations in learning might influence the language acquisition process.

In this note we discuss pMLU, a whole-word measure for phonological development that was proposed by Ingram (2002). Ingram's rules for calculating pMLU are analysed and we point at the crucial role of the level of transcription for making pMLU measurements comparable over different corpora. The main aim of the paper is an assessment of the reliability and the validity of pMLU. The assessment is accomplished using a computational tool for measuring pMLU on two large Dutch CHILDES corpora. We propose minimal sample sizes for reliable measurements relative to the stage of phonological development.

Liaison and elision in French are phonological phenomena that apply across word boundaries. French-speaking children make errors in contexts where liaison/elision typically occurs in adult speech. In this study, we asked if acquisition of French liaison/elision can be explained in a constructivist framework. We tested if children's liaison/elision was sensitive to co-occurrence and meaning. We expected children's use of liaison/elision to correlate with their experience with French (estimated by vocabulary). Thirty-one French-speaking children (twenty-five bilingual) between three and five years old produced familiar vowel-initial words, following four words: (1) un, (2) deux, (3) un petit and (4) beaucoup de. The children with smaller French vocabularies produced many vowel-initial words and some consonant-initial chunks. The children with larger French vocabularies produced liaison/elision correctly across several frames while associating a number interpretation with liaised consonants. These results suggest that children use a variety of cues to construct the appropriate use of liaison/elision.