We report three studies (one corpus, two experimental) that investigated the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Finnish-speaking children. Study 1 found that Finnish children's naturalistic exposure to RCs predominantly consists of non-subject relatives (i.e. oblique, object) which typically have inanimate head nouns. Study 2 tested children's comprehension of subject, object, and two types of oblique relatives. No difference was found in the children's performance on different structures, including a lack of previously widely reported asymmetry between subject and object relatives. However, children's comprehension was modulated by animacy of the head referent. Study 3 tested children's production of the same RC structures using sentence repetition. Again we found no subject–object asymmetry. The pattern of results suggested that distributional frequency patterns and the relative complexity of the relativizer contribute to the difficulty associated with particular RC structures.

The aim of the study was to investigate the syllable activation hypothesis in French beginning readers. Second graders performed a lexical decision task in which bisyllabic words were presented in two colours that either matched the syllable boundaries or not. The data showed that the children were sensitive to syllable match and to syllable complexity. In addition, good readers were slowed down while poor readers were speeded up by syllable match. These findings suggest that syllables are functional units of lexical access in children and that syllable activation is influenced by reading level.

Although not the focus of her article, phonological development in young children with speech sound disorders of various types is highly germane to Stoel-Gammon's discussion (this issue) for at least two primary reasons. Most obvious is that typical processes and milestones of phonological development are the standards and benchmarks against which we measure disorder and delay. Factors that impact children without disorders may suggest underlying causes or co-occurring symptoms of speech sound deficits, prognostic indicators of improvement, appropriate remediation strategies or some combination of these. Equally important is the fact that studying children with disorders can help us to verify and, in some cases, even unpack relationships among factors that are so closely interwoven in children who develop their phonologies at the typically very rapid rate that their individual influences cannot be discerned. Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS) is a particularly interesting case in point because, while it is universally accepted to be a motor speech disorder, symptoms include deficits in speech perception and often in literacy-related skills as well.

This research investigates language-general and language-specific properties of the acquisition of argument structure. Ten French preschoolers enacted forty sentences containing motion verbs; sixteen sentences were ungrammatical in that the syntactic frame was incompatible with the standard argument structure for the verb (e.g. *Le tigre va le lion = *The tiger goes the lion). Previous work (Naigles, Fowler & Helm; Naigles, Gleitman & Gleitman indicated that English-speaking two-year-olds faced with such ungrammatical sentences consistently altered the usual meaning of the verb to fit the syntactic frame (FRAME COMPLIANCE) whereas adults faced with the same sentences altered the syntax to fit the meaning of the verb (VERB COMPLIANCE). The age at which children began to perform Verb Compliantly varied by frame and by verb. The current study finds that the level of Verb Compliance in French five-year-olds largely mirrors that of English-speaking five-year-olds. The sole exception is the intransitive frame with an added prepositional phrase (e.g. *Le tigre amène près de la passerelle = *The tiger brings next to the ramp), which elicits a higher level of Verb Compliance among French kindergarteners than among their English learning peers. This effect may be due to the unambiguous interpretation of French spatial prepositions (i.e. next to has both locative and directional interpretations whereas près de supports only the locative interpretation). These data support the conclusion that the acquisition of argument structure is influenced by both language-general mechanisms (e.g. uniqueness, entrenchment) and language-specific properties (e.g. prepositional ambiguity).

Children's vocabulary ability at school entry is highly variable and predictive of later language and literacy outcomes. Sleep is potentially useful in understanding and explaining that variability, with sleep patterns being predictive of global trajectories of language acquisition. Here, we looked to replicate and extend these findings. Data from 354 children (without English as an additional language) in the Born in Bradford study were analysed, describing the mean intercepts and linear trends in parent-reported day-time and night-time sleep duration over five time points between 6 and 36 months-of-age. The mean difference between night-time and day-time sleep was predictive of receptive vocabulary at age five, with more night-time sleep relative to day-time sleep predicting better language. An exploratory analysis suggested that socioeconomic status was predictive of vocabulary outcomes, with sleep patterns partially mediating this relationship. We suggest that the consolidation of sleep patterns acts as a driver of early language development.

Research on language in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) has been fueled by persistent theoretical controversies for two decades. These shifted from initial focus on dissociations between language and cognition functions, to examining the paradox of socio-communicative impairments despite high sociability and relatively proficient expressive language. We investigated possible sources of communicative difficulties in WS in a collaborative referential communication game. Five- to thirteen-year-old children with WS were compared to verbal mental age- and to chronological age-matched typically developing children in their ability to consider different types of information to select a speaker's intended referent from an array of items. Significant group differences in attention deployment to object locations, and in the number and types of clarification requests, indicated the use of less efficient and less mature strategies for reference resolution in WS than expected based on mental age, despite learning effects similar to those of the comparison groups, shown as the game progressed.

This study evaluates the ability of different measures of socioeconomic status (SES) to predict lexical outcomes for preschoolers raised in a context of nationwide bilingualism. The participants were 58 children aged 3;11–4;3 from Maltese-dominant homes who attended state preschools. Receptive picture name judgement and picture naming, in Maltese and English, were employed to measure receptive and expressive lexical abilities, respectively. Lexical outcomes for four individual SES variables and a single composite SES measure were similar but not directly interchangeable. The composite SES variable emerged as most strongly predictive of children's lexical performance. Receptive judgement of phonological accuracy improved similarly in both languages with higher composite SES. Naming skills increased significantly in English but not in Maltese, suggesting differences in English input related to parental SES. A focus on SES in relation to lexical skills in two majority languages is novel and adds to current understanding of normative bilingual acquisition.

This study concerns the acquisition of the meaning of adversative connectives in French and German children from 7; 8 to 9; 11. French mais has both a substitutive and a contrastive use which is expressed by two different connectives in German, i.e. sondern and aber. 36 French and 36 German children were tested in a completion and a judgement task. Two hypotheses are confirmed: (a) substitutive but is easier to process and hence is acquired earlier than contrastive but; (b) the interpretation of contrastive but-sentences depends on their inferential complexity relative to a given context. A third assumption about the facilitative effect of lexical differentiation in German was only partially supported by the data. This issue needs further investigation with more languages and younger children.

Can children tell how different a speaker's accent is from their own? In Experiment 1 (N = 84), four- and five-year-olds heard speakers with different accents and indicated where they thought each speaker lived relative to a reference point on a map that represented their current location. Five-year-olds generally placed speakers with stronger accents (as judged by adults) at more distant locations than speakers with weaker accents. In contrast, four-year-olds did not show differences in where they placed speakers with different accents. In Experiment 2 (N = 56), the same sentences were low-pass filtered so that only prosodic information remained. This time, children judged which of five possible aliens had produced each utterance, given a reference speaker. Children of both ages showed differences in which alien they chose based on accent, and generally rated speakers with foreign accents as more different from their native accent than speakers with regional accents. Together, the findings show that preschoolers perceive accent distance, that children may be sensitive to the distinction between foreign and regional accents, and that preschoolers likely use prosody to differentiate among accents.

Regular and irregular inflection in children's production has been examined in many previous studies. Yet, little is known about the processes involved in children's recognition of inflected words. To gain insight into how children process inflected words, the current study examines regular -t and irregular -n participles of German using the cross-modal priming technique testing 108 monolingual German-speaking children in two age groups (group I, mean age: 8;4, group II, mean age: 9;9) and a control group of 72 adults. Although both age groups of children had the same full priming effect as adults for -t forms, only children of age group II showed an adult-like (partial) priming effect for -n participles. We argue that children (within the age range tested) employ the same mechanisms for regular inflection as adults but that the lexical retrieval processes required for irregular forms become more efficient when children get older.

Children acquiring French elaborate their early verb constructions by adding adjacent morphemes incrementally at the left edge of core verbs. This hypothesis was tested with 2657 verb uses from four children between 1;3 and 2;7. Consistent with the Adjacency Hypothesis, children added clitic subjects first only to present tense forms (as in il saute ‘he jumps’); modals to infinitives (as in faut sauter ‘has to jump’); and auxiliaries to past participles (as in a sauté ‘has jumped’). Only after this did the children add subjects to the left of a modal or auxiliary, as in elle veut sauter ‘she wants to jump’, or elle a sauté ‘she has jumped’. The order in which these elements were added, and the development in the frequencies of the constructions, all support the predictions of the Adjacency Hypothesis for left edge development in early verb constructions.

Longitudinal data on the development of personal inflections in Portuguese are presented. Analysis of the data reveals that, initially, the subjects used a single inflection for all verbs, regardless of the intended subject. The first formal distinction to appear was between verbs bearing the unmarked ending and those inflected for first person singular. Analyses of the acquisition of the standard first person inflections are presented in the form of rules; overgeneralization of these rules is evident, especially in perfect tense verbs. Possible explanations for the use of the third person singular verb form as the unmarked form are discussed.

The present study tests the hypothesis that many of the grammatical errors that occur during the course of language development can serve as ‘auto-input’ leading directly to the acquisition of new expressive forms. A free-speech corpus of grammatically incorrect sentences was gathered from each of 4 four-year-old subjects. Three additional sets of sentences were constructed: sentences containing errors similar to those actually produced, sentences containing ‘baby errors’ and correct sentences. The children were asked to judge these sentences as correct or incorrect. Significantly fewer corrections were made in the sentences with subject-generated errors than in the sentences with similar errors or ‘baby errors’. These results can be explained by assuming that children learn their own errors.

Van Valin (Journal of Child Language29, 2002, 161–75) presents a critique of Rowland & Pine (Journal of Child Language27, 2000, 157–81) and argues that the wh-question data from Adam (in Brown, A first language, Cambridge, MA, 1973) cannot be explained in terms of input frequencies as we suggest. Instead, he suggests that the data can be more successfully accounted for in terms of Role and Reference Grammar. In this note we re-examine the pattern of inversion and uninversion in Adam's wh-questions and argue that the RRG explanation cannot account for some of the developmental facts it was designed to explain.

The present study examined gender and age patterns of diminutive use in conversations between 32 Spanish-speaking Peruvian mothers and their three- and five-year-old children. Results confirm previous findings concerning both parents' greater use of diminutives with younger children and children's early acquisition of this complex aspect of morphology. However, findings do not support previous studies on gender differences in parental use of diminutives with young children. Results also revealed that mothers' and children's imitations of their interlocutors' diminutized words promoted their interlocutors' overall diminutive use. This finding highlights the acute sensitivity of both speakers to each others' language and the potential role of imitation in older children's language development.

The speech of children aged 11, in socially contrasted groups, was analysed across a range of communicative tasks. On most ‘traditional’ measures, consistent group differences did not appear. There were significant differences on measures directly derived from the ‘planning principles’ said by Bernstein to underlie restricted and elaborated codes. Even on these, however, there was considerable task variation. There was no evidence of rigidity in the speech of the lower-working-class children, and no evidence of a persistent orientation to one code rather than the other.

In this paper, we ask whether children are sensitive to the needs of their interlocutor, and, if so, whether they – like adults – modify acoustic characteristics of their speech as part of a communicative goal. In a production task, preschoolers participated in a word learning task that favored the use of clear speech. Children produced vowels that were longer, more intense, more dispersed in the vowel space, and had a more expanded F0 range than normal speech. Two perception studies with adults showed that these acoustic differences were perceptible and were used to distinguish normal and clear speech styles. We conclude that preschoolers are sensitive to aspects of the speaker–hearer relationship calling upon them to modify their speech in ways that benefit their listener.

Some inconsistency is observed in the results from studies of reading development regarding the role of the syllable in visual word recognition, perhaps due to a disparity between the tasks used. We adopted a word-spotting paradigm, with Spanish children of second grade (mean age: 7 years) and sixth grade (mean age: 11 years). The children were asked to detect one-syllable words that could be found at the beginning of pseudo-words, with the boundary between the word and the remaining letters being manipulated. The end of the embedded word could either match the syllabic boundary (e.g. the word FIN in the pseudo-word FINLO, where the syllable boundary is between N and L) or not (e.g. FINUS, where the syllable boundary is located between I and N). The results showed that children of both grades were faster in the syllabic than the non-syllabic condition, and that the magnitude of this effect was the same regardless of reading ability. The results suggest an early universality in the use of syllables in Spanish, regardless of reading level.

Sixty 3- to 6-year-old children were tested in order to assess certain aspects of their ability to answer questions alluding to hypothetical events. Each child was asked four hypothetical questions from each of four topic areas: (1) past-parent, (2) past-fantasy, (3) future-parent and (4) future-fantasy. Although correct responses increased with age for each of the four categories, children more often responded correctly to future hypothetical questions than to past hypothetical questions and to hypothetical questions involving fantasy characters than to hypothetical questions involving the children's parents. Moreover, the interaction of the past-future and parent-fantasy factors yielded an overall pattern of difficulty for the four topic areas. These findings are discussed in terms of the factors which influence the development of hypothetical reference skills.