Thirty-six three-, four- and five-year-olds were asked to select labels for deceptive stimuli (e.g. for an eraser that looked like a pencil). Three types of labelling were investigated –simple (e.g. ‘is an eraser’); appearance-predicated (e.g. ‘looks like an eraser’); and reality-predicated (e.g. ‘is really and truly an eraser’). An age-related appearance-reality shift was observed in simple labelling (e.g. older children were more likely than younger ones to accept eraser and reject pencil as simple names for the pencil-eraser). This trend was robust over method and semantic domain, though weaker with object than with colour labels. As in previous research, older children were more likely than younger ones to map different appearance- than reality-predicated labels onto an item (e.g. to accept that the pencil-eraser looks like a pencil, but is really and truly an eraser); however, all age groups were reluctant to extend more than one name to a stimulus via a common predicate (e.g. to accept two reality-predicated labels for the same object). This one-label-per-predicate pattern was observed more frequently within reality than within appearance predicates; more frequently with colour than with object names, and with questions blocked by predicate than by name. It is argued that younger children maintained this pattern because of inflexible encoding, but that older ones did so because of better understanding of the appearance-reality distinction, greater reality dominance, and a Mutual Exclusivity bias.

Williams syndrome (WS) is often cited as the prime example within developmental disorders of the dissociation of language from other cognitive skills, particularly from visuo-motor skills. This claim has been responsible for the challenges posed by this population to cognitive theories and to models of language acquisition. Two Hebrew-speaking children with WS were followed longitudinally for 18 months, from the first occurrences of two word combinations. Y was 3;9–5;3 and BT was 4;2–5;8 during data collection. Both children had an MLU of 1·8–2·8. The children's linguistic profiles were compared to the profiles of typically-developing (TD) children of similar MLU as well as to the profiles of 11 children with a variety of neurodevelopmental disorders (ND), matched on MLU. The profiles exhibited by the children with WS throughout the period of the study differed from the profiles seen in both control groups.

This study compared the temporal measurements of stop consonants in 29 three- to six-year-old Mandarin-speaking children and 12 Mandarin-speaking adults. Each participant produced 18 Mandarin disyllabic words which contained six stop consonants /p, pʰ, t, tʰ, k, kʰ/ each followed by three vowels /a, i, u/ at the word-initial position in the first syllable. The temporal measurements of VOT, overall burst duration, average duration per burst, number of bursts, and VOT-lag duration were obtained. Although adult-like short-lag VOTs were achieved in all children, the long-lag VOTs were widespread in the younger group and gradually developed to a concentrated distribution in the older children. Further analysis of the burst and VOT-lag revealed that these children tended to produce shorter average duration per burst and longer VOT-lag than the adults. These results indicate that children in this age range may not have developed adult-like laryngeal–oral timing pattern and airflow control for stop production.

This study investigated the acquisition of word-patterns and roots in the nominal system of the spoken language of Palestinian Arabic (PA) and its distance from Standard Arabic (StA). It described, analyzed, and quantified the nominal system (roots and word-patterns) as reflected in the language corpus of Palestinian-Arab kindergarteners 3 to 6 years old. The results showed that non-linear derived nouns (deverbal nouns) are the most frequently used category (49.5%). Primitive nouns comprise 43.1% of the nouns, whereas linear derived nouns barely exist before children start school (0.3%). Additionally, the results showed that half of the nouns were built from common word-patterns and roots between PA and StA, whereas 30% of the nouns were constructed from different word-patterns with common roots. Although PA and StA have much in common morphologically, there exists a significant degree of divergence.

Evidence provided by contrastive word order for agent and patient semantic categories in young children's spontaneous speech is confounded. Agents (effectors of the action) tend to be animate; patients (entities acted upon) tend to be inanimate. In an experiment designed to circumvent this confounding and to test young children's linguistic sensitivity to the role an entity plays in the action, nine children (2; 4·0–2; 11·5) described actions involving animate and inanimate entities playing both agent and patient roles. Four linguistic measures were observed. On every measure agents were treated differently from patients. For the most part, these agent–patient differences persisted when animate and inanimate entities were examined separately. These results provide evidence for the child's intention to talk about the role an entity plays, independent of its animateness, and also suggest that the child uses role-defined linguistic categories like AGENT and PATIENT to communicate these relational intentions.

To understand how children develop adult argument structure, we must understand the nature of syntactic and semantic representations during development. The present studies compare the performance of children aged 2;6 on the two intransitive alternations in English: patient (Daddy is cooking the food/The food is cooking) and agent (Daddy is cooking). Children displayed abstract knowledge of both alternations, producing appropriate syntactic generalizations with novel verbs. These generalizations were adult-like in both flexibility and constraint. Rather than limiting their generalizations to lexicalized frames, children produced sentences with a variety of nouns and pronouns. They also avoided semantic overgeneralizations, producing intransitive sentences that respected the event restrictions and animacy cues. Some generated semantically appropriate agent intransitives when discourse pressure favored patient intransitives, indicating a stronger command of the first alternation. This was in line with frequency distributions in child-directed speech. These findings suggest that children have early access to representations that permit flexible argument structure generalization.

This paper evaluates Lust's (1977) study of coordination in child language, both on its own merits and in the light of my own research. First, particular design weaknesses in Lust's study are noted which render her results questionable. In addition, it is argued that the hypotheses proposed by Lust fail to make any substantive predictions about the types of errors which children make with coordinate structures. Finally, it is shown that Lust's hypotheses cannot account for the results of my own comprehension and non-imitative production experiments. It is concluded that Lust cannot account for a wide range of phenomena concerning coordination in child language, and consequently an alternative set of hypotheses is proposed.

This diary study describes early phonological and lexical development in a child with chronic otitis media with effusion. Equipped with the tools of a referential/analytic language-learner, the child solved the problem of reduced and fluctuating auditory input with phonological selection and avoidance strategies that capitalized on prosodie cues. This ‘tone-language’ approach resulted in a lexical inventory that would be categorized as an extreme expressive style. Having ‘boot-strapped’ her lexical learning, the child continued to rely on phonological constraints and selection strategies to fuel lexical and syntactic growth, i.e. cross-domain interactions leading to a vocabulary spurt and the onset of two-word utterances. These findings illustrate the need to consider interactions among performance, input and linguistic constraints in order to explain individual variation in language learning.

Lexical stress is useful for a number of language learning tasks. In particular, it helps infants segment the speech stream and identify phonetic contrasts. Recent work has demonstrated that infants aged 1 ; 0 can learn two novel words differing only in their stress pattern. In the current study, we ask whether infants aged 1 ; 0 store stress information in their representations of words even when it not required for the task. To this end, we taught infants novel, three-syllable word–object pairings. At test, we manipulated the word by presenting infants with forms that shared the stress pattern of the familiar words but differed in the segments, and forms that shared the segments of the familiar word but differed in the stress pattern. Our findings reveal that infants' representations of new words include word-level stress information and do not simply contain the information critical for distinguishing between different forms.

Eisenberg (2002) presents data from an experiment investigating three- and four-year-old children's comprehension of restrictive relative clauses (RC). From the results she argues, contrary to Hamburger & Crain (1982), that children do not have discourse knowledge of the felicity conditions of RCs before acquiring the syntax of relativization. This note evaluates this conclusion on the basis of the methodology used, and proposes that an account of syntactic development needs to be sensitive to the real-time processing requirements acquisition places on the learner.

Over the course of acquiring deverbal compounds like truck driver, English-speaking children pass through a stage when they produce ungrammatical compounds like drive-truck. These errors have been attributed to canonical phrasal ordering (Clark, Hecht & Mulford, 1986). In this study, we compared British and Canadian children's compound production. Both dialects have the same phrasal ordering but some different lexical items (e.g. answer-phone exists only in British English). If influenced by these lexical differences, British children would produce more ungrammatical Verb–Object (VO) compounds in trying to produce the more complex deverbal (Object–Verb-er) than the Canadian children. 36 British children between the ages of 3;6 and 5;6 and 36 age-matched Canadian children were asked to produce novel compounds (like sun juggler). The British children produced more ungrammatical compounds and fewer grammatical compounds than the Canadian children. We argue that children's errors in deverbal compounds may be due in part to competing lexical structures.

This paper's authors examine the interpretation of transitive sentences with varying word orders /SVO, OVS, SOV, OSV/. The subjects were Hungarian-Russian bilingual preschool children and their Hungarian and Russian monolingual peers. Bever's ‘first noun as agent’ strategy – as indicated by OVS and OSV errors – appears to be weaker in the bilinguals. An explanation for this is proposed in terms of Slobin's ‘attention to the end of words’ factor. The mistaken identification of sentence-initial objects as agents depends on case marking allomorphy. Bilinguals, in general, appear to pay more attention to allomorphy and thus make fewer interpretation errors than their monolingual peers.

The present study investigated children's early use of verb inflection in Japanese by comparing a generativist account, which predicts that the past tense will have a special default-like status for the child during the early stages, with a constructivist input-driven account, which assumes that children's acquisition and use of inflectional forms reflects verb-specific distributional patterns in their input. Analysis of naturalistic data from four Japanese children aged 1;5 to 2;10 showed that there was substantial by-verb variation in the use of inflectional forms from the earliest stages of verb use, and no general preference for past tense forms. Correlational and partial correlational analyses showed that it was possible to predict the proportional frequency with which the child produced verbs in past tense versus other inflectional forms on the basis of differences in the proportional frequency with which the verb occurred in past tense form in the child's input, even after controlling for differences in the rate at which verbs occurred in past tense form in input averaged across the caregivers of the other children in the sample. When taken together, these results count against the idea that the past tense has a special default-like status in early child Japanese, and in favour of a constructivist input-driven account of children's early use of verb inflection.

The present studies examined factors that influence children's and adults' interpretation of a novel word. Four factors are hypothesized to emphasize that a label refers to a richly structured category (also known as a ‘kind’): generic language, internal property attributions, familiar kind labels and absence of a target photograph. In Study 1, for college students (N=125), internal property attributions resulted in more taxonomic and fewer shape responses. In Study 2, for four-year-olds (N=126), the presence of generic language and familiar kind labels resulted in more taxonomic choices. Further, the presence of familiar kind labels resulted in fewer shape choices. The results suggest that, when learning new words, children and adults are sensitive to factors that imply kind reference.

This study investigates perception and production of the Catalan mid-vowel /e/-/ɛ/ contrast by two groups of 4.5-year-old Catalan–Spanish bilingual children, differing in language dominance. Perception was assessed with an XAB discrimination task involving familiar words and non-words. Production accuracy was measured using a familiar-word elicitation task. Overall, Catalan-dominant bilingual children outperformed Spanish-dominant bilinguals, the latter showing high variability in production accuracy, while being slightly above chance level in perception. No correlation between perception and production performance could be established in this group. The effect of language dominance alone could not explain the Spanish-dominant participants’ performance, but quality of Catalan input (native vs. accented speech) was identified as an important factor behind familiar-word production and the inaccurate representation of the target contrast in the lexicon of the bilinguals’ less-dominant language. More fine-grained measurements of experience-related factors are needed for a full understanding of the acquisition of challenging contrasts in bilingual contexts.

Languages differ greatly in how they express causal events. In languages like Japanese, the subjects of causative sentences, or causers, are generally animate and intentional, whereas in other languages like English, causers range widely from animate beings to inanimate objects (e.g. Wolff, Jeon & Li, 2009). This paper explores when children learn to represent cause in their native tongue and how this learning occurs over the course of development. English- and Japanese-speaking preschoolers watched animations that were caused by (i) humans acting intentionally, (ii) humans acting accidentally, (iii) objects that generate energy (e.g. a machine), and (iv) objects that do not generate energy (e.g. a tool). Children were then asked to choose a good description of the event between two options. At age three, English- and Japanese-speaking children performed the task in similar ways, attending only to the intention of causal agents; however, at age four, speakers of the two languages diverged. English speakers were more likely to accept energy-generating objects such as machines as the subject of a lexical causative sentence than Japanese speakers.

This study focuses on the relationship between content elements and mental-state language in narratives from twenty-seven children with autism (ASD), twelve children with language impairment (LI), and thirty typically developing children (TD). The groups did not differ on chronological age (10;6–14;0) and non-verbal cognitive skills, and the groups with ASD and TD did not differ on language measures. The children with ASD and LI had fewer content elements of the storyline than the TD children. Compared with the TD children, the children with ASD used fewer subordinate clauses about the characters’ thoughts, and preferred talking about mental states as reported speech, especially in the form of direct speech. The children with LI did not differ from the TD children on these measures. The results are discussed in the context of difficulties with socio-cognition in children with ASD and of language difficulties in children with LI.

The present study investigates whether four- and six-year-old children use pragmatic competence as a criterion for learning from someone else. Specifically, we ask whether children use others' adherence to Gricean maxims to determine whether they will offer valid labels for novel objects. Six-year-olds recognized adherence to the maxims of quality and relation and subsequently trusted the labels provided by a maxim adherer. Four-year-olds displayed this pattern when judging adherence to quality but not relation. A linear regression revealed that children's ability to identify maxim adherers predicted their ability to choose the correct object during word-learning trials. This research demonstrates that children use others' pragmatic history when judging the reliability of the information they offer.

The current study evaluated the separate and combined effects of bilingualism and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on informativeness and definiteness marking of referential expressions. Hebrew-speaking monolingual children (21 with ASD and 28 with typical language development) and Russian–Hebrew-speaking bilingual children (13 with ASD and 30 with typical language development) aged 4–9 years participated. Informativeness, indexed by referential contrasts, was affected by ASD, but not by bilingualism. Definiteness use was non-target-like in children with ASD and in bilingual children, and it was mainly predicted by children’s morpho-syntactic abilities in Hebrew. Language-universal and language-specific properties of referential use are discussed.