Predictive relations were examined between measures of 20 mothers' behavioural and verbal general and specific responsiveness and intrusive and supportive directiveness and their children's subsequent expressive vocabularies during three developmental periods with endpoints at the beginning, middle, and end of the second year: 0;10 to 1;1, 1;1 to 1;5, and 1;5 to 1;9. Regression analyses, controlling for mothers' utterance frequencies and children's initial lexicons, revealed considerable consistency between reported and observed lexicons but changing patterns of predictive relations with development. During the first period, behavioural, but not verbal, measures of maternal responsiveness and supportive directiveness were positively predictive. In period two, verbal, but not behavioural, measures predicted children's vocabularies, with specific responsiveness and supportive directiveness as positive predictors and intrusive directiveness as a negative predictor. During the final period, mothers' behavioural and verbal responsiveness and behavioural supportive directiveness positively predicted and their verbal intrusive directiveness negatively predicted children's lexical growth.

The Principle of Contrast, that different words have different meanings, holds for adult language use. But at what age do children assume Contrast ? Do they rely on it from the start, or do they assume that new words may have the same meaning (the Null Hypothesis) until they discover otherwise ? Both the Null Hypothesis and Contrast have certain consequences. The Null Hypothesis places a heavy burden on languagelearners, whereas children could discover Contrast as part of their experience of rational behaviour. Examples that have been claimed to go counter to Contrast fall into two groups. Those in the first do not in fact violate Contrast at all. Those in the second rely on sameness of extension instead of sameness of meaning, and so are indeterminate as counter evidence. Usage consistent with Contrast, on the other hand, is pervasive in children's speech from an early age.

Data from an experiment on gender acquisition with 160 Spanish children from four to eleven years of age are presented in this paper. In Spanish there are three possible clues (semantic, morphophonological and syntactic), that speakers can use to determine the gender of a noun and the agreement of other variable elements accompanying it. Items where only one of the clues was present, items where there was a combined effect of two of them in agreement (both were feminine or masculine), and items where clues were in conflict (one masculine and the other feminine) were introduced in the experiment. This experimental manipulation made it possible to test the relative strength of the different types of competing clues. In particular, the aim of the present study was to determine the relative importance of intralinguistic and extralinguistic clues, as evidenced by the ability of Spanish children to recognize the gender of a noun upon hearing it in a particular frame, and consequently, to establish the agreement of other variable elements accompanying it. A procedure similar to that used by Karmiloff-Smith (1979).was employed. The results (which are compared with those obtained in other languages) give support to the theoretical view that children pay far more attention to syntactic and morphophonological (intralinguistic) information than to semantic (extralinguistic) information.

In this study we compared the conversations of mothers and fathers with their children at 1;3 and 159, with special attention to breakdown-repair sequences. We found that, overall, children and secondary caregiver fathers experienced more communicative breakdowns than did children and primary caregiver mothers. More specifically, fathers requested clarification of their children more often than did mothers, and they most often used a non-specific query (e.g. What?). Mothers used more specific queries (e.g. Put it where?) and were involved in more ‘looped’ sequences involving multiple requests for clarification. Fathers also failed to acknowledge child utterances more often than did mothers. After a father non-acknowledgement, children tended not to persist and when they did they often received further non-acknowledgements; the dyad did not often return to the child's original topic. After a maternal non-acknowledgement, on the other hand, children persisted and the dyad more often returned to its previous topic. The results are interpreted as support for the Bridge Hypothesis which claims that fathers present children with communicative challenges that help prepare them for communication with less familiar adults.

Many researchers believe that there is a logical problem at the centre of language acquisition theory. According to this analysis, the input to the learner is too inconsistent and incomplete to determine the acquisition of grammar. Moreover, when corrective feedback is provided, children tend to ignore it. As a result, language learning must rely on additional constraints from universal grammar. To solve this logical problem, theorists have proposed a series of constraints and parameterizations on the form of universal grammar. Plausible alternatives to these constraints include: conservatism, item-based learning, indirect negative evidence, competition, cue construction, and monitoring. Careful analysis of child language corpora has cast doubt on claims regarding the absence of positive exemplars. Using demonstrably available positive data, simple learning procedures can be formulated for each of the syntactic structures that have traditionally motivated invocation of the logical problem. Within the perspective of emergentist theory (MacWhinney, 2001), the operation of a set of mutually supportive processes is viewed as providing multiple buffering for developmental outcomes. However, the fact that some syntactic structures are more difficult to learn than others can be used to highlight areas of intense grammatical competition and processing load.

Previous research has suggested that the syntactic and semantic characteristics of mother speech are determined by the underlying intention of mothers to control (Newport 1977) or to converse with (Snow 1977) the child. The present study attempts to delineate the structure among functionally categorized mother conversational behaviours, especially those which might reflect the mother's intention to control or converse with her child. The utterances of II mothers with their children (aged 2; 5–3; 0) were categorized according to their illocutionary force or function. Conversational parameters, such as topic change rate and talkativeness, were also measured. Intercorrelations among all these mother variables showed a polarized pattern, reflecting two predominant mother intentions for conversational interaction: the control of the child's physical actions, and the elicitation of his conversational participation. Implications of the findings, especially those indicating the incompatibility of controlling and conversation-eliciting intentions, are discussed.

This study examined the effect of two linguistic factors on children's understanding of idioms. Kindergarten, first, third and fourth graders listened to idiomatic expressions either alone or at the end of short story contexts. Their task was to explain verbally the intended meanings of these idioms and then to choose the correct idiomatic interpretations of these phrases. The results showed that in the presence of supporting context younger children (kindergarten and first graders) understood idioms that were syntactically frozen (e.g. turn back the clock) better than they did idioms which can be seen in a variety of syntactic forms (e.g. lay down the law). Older children (third and fourth graders) comprehended both kinds of idiom equally well. Moreover, with context, children at all grade levels were better at explaining the figurative meanings of idioms whose literal and idiomatic interpretations were closely related (e.g. hold your tongues) than they were at explaining idioms whose literal and figurative meanings were not closely related (e.g. beat around the bush). Without context there were few significant differences noted in children's understanding of the different kinds of idiom. The significance of these findings for developmental models of idiom comprehension is discussed.

The simultaneous acquisition of two languages in early childhood presents an interesting test case for language acquisition theories. Children in bilingual environments receive input which could potentially lead to output systems different to those of monolingual children. The speech of three bilingual German-English children was recorded monthly between the ages of 2;0 and 5;0. The analysis of word order in the verb phrase shows that initial structural separation was followed by an extended period of non-target structures in German before the children eventually worked out which structures overlap and which structures differentiate the two languages. The bilingual data point towards language being acquired incrementally, on the basis of cue strength and cue cost. It is suggested that the partially overlapping structures in the input from German and English create structural saliencies for the child before they are functionally accessible. Functional identification eventually leads to structural separation.

Maternal infant-directed speech in Mandarin Chinese and Turkish (two mother–child dyads each; ages of children between 0;11 and 1;8) was examined to see if cues exist in input that might assist infants' assignment of words to lexical and functional item categories. Distributional, phonological, and acoustic measures were analysed. In each language, lexical and functional items (i.e. syllabic morphemes) differed significantly on numerous measures. Despite differences in mean values between categories, distributions of values typically displayed substantial overlap. However, simulations with self-organizing neural networks supported the conclusion that although individual dimensions had low cue validity, in each language multidimensional constellations of presyntactic cues are sufficient to guide assignment of words to rudimentary grammatical categories.

The main objective of this paper is to describe the trajectory of Danish children's early lexical development relative to other languages, by comparing a Danish study based on the Danish adaptation of The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) to 17 comparable CDI-studies. The second objective is to address the feasibility of cross-linguistic CDI-comparisons. The main finding is that the developmental trend of Danish children's early lexical development is similar to trends observed in other languages, yet the vocabulary comprehension score in the Danish children is the lowest across studies from age 1 ; 0 onwards. We hypothesize that the delay is related to the nature of Danish sound structure, which presents Danish children with a harder task of segmentation. We conclude that CDI-studies are an important resource for cross-language studies, but reporting of studies needs to be standardized and the availability of published data improved in order to make comparisons more straightforward.

This paper presents a study of young children's understanding of a constraint on English word order, which is that pronouns and proper names cannot be modified by prenominai adjectives. For adults, this is a syntactic constraint: adjectives can only precede nouns, and pronouns and proper names are lexical Noun Phrases (NPs). In two analyses, the spontaneous speech of 14 one- and two-year-old children was studied. These analyses show that even in children's very first word combinations, they almost never say things like big Fred or big he. Some non-syntactic theories of this phenomenon are discussed and found to have serious descriptive problems, supporting the claim that children understand knowledge of word order through rules that order abstract linguistic categories. A theory is proposed as to how children could use semantic information to draw the noun/NP distinction and to acquire this restriction on English word order.

Little is known about the acquisition of phonology by children learning Cantonese as their first language. This paper describes the phoneme repertoires and phonological error patterns used by 268 Cantonese-speaking children aged 2;0 to 6;0, as well as a longitudinal study of tone acquisition by four children aged 1;2 to 2;0. Children had mastered the contrastive use of tones and vowels by two years. While the order of acquisition of consonants was similar to that reported for English, the rate of acquisition was more rapid. The developmental error patterns used by more than 10% of children are also reported as common in other languages. However, specific rules associated with Cantonese phonology were also identified. Few phonological errors were made after age four. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that the ambient language influences the implementation of universal tendencies in phonological acquisition.

57 Polish-speaking children aged from 2;4, to 4;8 and 16 adult controls participated in a nonce-word inflection experiment testing their ability to use the genitive, dative and accusative inflections productively. Results show that this ability develops early: the majority of two-year-olds were already productive with all inflections apart from dative neuter; and the overall performance of the four-year-olds was very similar to that of adults. All age groups were more productive with inflections that apply to large and/or phonologically diverse classes, although class size and token frequency appeared to be more important for younger children (two- and three-year-olds) and phonological diversity for older children and adults. Regularity, on the other hand, was a very poor predictor of productivity. The results support usage-based models of language acquisition and are problematic for the dual mechanism model.

Both the input directed to the child, and the child's ability to process that input, are likely to impact the child's language acquisition. We explore how these factors inter-relate by tracking the relationships among: (a) lexical properties of maternal child-directed speech to prelinguistic (7-month-old) infants (N = 121); (b) these infants' abilities to segment lexical targets from conversational child-directed utterances in an experimental paradigm; and (c) the children's vocabulary outcomes at age 2;0. Both repetitiveness in maternal input and the child's speech segmentation skills at age 0;7 predicted language outcomes at 2;0; moreover, while these factors were somewhat inter-related, they each had independent effects on toddler vocabulary skill, and there was no interaction between the two.

Five French-speaking middle-class couples and their male only-children were tape-recorded separately at home while interacting verbally in a free-play, a story-telling, and in a family meal situation. The children's ages ranged from 1; 6 to 3; 0. The speech of the fathers, mothers, and children was transcribed and analysed for its semantic, syntactic, and language-teaching aspects. The results indicate that paternal speech displays the same simplification processes usually found in maternal speech to young children. Paternal speech, however, also contains some linguistic patterns at variance with those found in maternal speech. It is hypothesised that maternal and paternal speech may be complementary in their influence on language development in the children.

There are very general phonological processes which appear to operate in one form or another when any child learns a first language. This study attempts to outline and exemplify the most general of these, e.g. the reduction of consonant clusters, the deletion of unstressed syllables. In addition, the study criticizes the point of view that phonological development consists primarily of the child substituting one sound for another. Rather, phonological development reflects very general processes that affect entire classes of sounds. Lastly, the study suggests that identifying general rules can ultimately lead to more insightful information concerning separate strategies that individual children follow.

The aim of this study is to determine universal vs. language-specific aspects of children's ability to organize cohesive anaphoric relations in discourse. Analyses examine narratives produced on the basis of two picture sequences by subjects of four ages (preschoolers, seven-year-olds, ten-year-olds, adults) in four languages: English (n = 80), German (n = 40), French (n = 40), and Mandarin Chinese (n = 40). Particular attention is placed on the impact of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors in determining the uses of referring expressions and of word order in the maintenance of reference to the animate characters. Although subjecthood and agency determine NP position within the clause, role relations in discourse coreference account for NP form in all languages, notwithstanding some variations across languages, ages, and referents (e.g. density of coreference, null elements vs. overt pronouns, clause structures). It is concluded that the development of anaphora is determined by universal pragmatic principles and by language-specific properties characterizing how languages map discourse-internal and sentence-internal functions onto the same forms.

This research explored overextension in the early vocabularies of six children, followed in a language diary study from 1; 0 to 1; 8. Results indicated that only one-third of the first 75 words acquired by each child were ever overextended. A small set of high-frequency, early acquired words accounted for a disproportionate number of overextensions. Overextensions were classified into three types: categorical overinclusions, analogical overextensions and predicate statements. Four types of information served as the bases for word applications: perceptual, action-functional, affective and contextual. The use of words to denote associative complexes of a well-organized, systematic character was discussed as a characteristic form of early word usage.

This paper outlines functionally motivated quantifiable criteria for characterizing different facets of discourse – global-level principles, categories of referential content, clause-linking complex syntax, local linguistic expression and overall discourse stance – in relation to the variables of development, genre and modality. Concern is with later, school-age language development, in the conviction that the long developmental route of language acquisition can profitably be examined in the context of extended discourse. Findings are reviewed from a cross-linguistic project that elicited narrative and expository texts in both speech and writing at four age groups: (9–10 years, 12–13, 16–17 and adults). Clear developmental patterns emerge from middle childhood to adulthood, with significant shifts in adolescence; global-level text organization is mastered earlier in narratives than in expository essays, but the latter promote more advanced use of local-level lexicon and syntax; and spoken texts are more spread out than their denser written counterparts in clause-linkage, referential content and lexical usage. These and other findings are discussed in terms of the growth and reorganization of knowledge about types of discourse and text-embedded language use.

This study examined parental report as a source of information about toddlers' productive vocabulary in 105 low-income families living in either urban or rural communities. Parental report using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory – Short Form (CDI) at child age 2;0 was compared to concurrent spontaneous speech measures and standardized language assessments, and the utility of each source of data for predicting receptive vocabulary at age 3;0 (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test) was evaluated. Relations between language measures of interest and background variables such as maternal age, education, and race/ethnicity were also considered. Results showed that for the sample as a whole, parental report was moderately associated with other language measures at age 2;0 and accounted for unique variance in PPVT at age 3;0, controlling for child language skills derived from a standard cognitive assessment. However, predictive validity differed by community, being stronger in the rural than in the urban community. Implications of significant differences in background characteristics of mothers in the two sites are discussed.