A new test of children's flexible use of semantic cues for word learning extended previous results. In Experiment 1, three- to five-year-olds (N=51) completed two tests of interpreting several novel words for the same stimulus arrays. Within-sentence phrasal cues implied different stimulus referent properties. Children's cue-using flexibility in the new Flexible Induction of Meanings [Words for Animates] test (FIM-An) was strongly correlated with an established test (Flexible Induction of Meanings [Words for Objects]; Deák, 2000). Individual children showed between-test consistency in using cues to flexibly assign words to different referent properties. There were large individual differences, as well as limited age differences, in the distribution of flexible and inflexible response patterns. The comprehensibility of specific cues, and perceptual salience of specific properties, explained much of the variance. Proportions of flexible and inflexible patterns shifted with age. Experiment 2 replicated these results in N=36 three- and four-year-olds, using a modified FIM-An with more distinctive cues.

Three experiments investigated the role of oppositional predicate dimensionality in four- and five-year-old children's processing of negation. In Experiment 1 children (37 four-year-olds, mean age 4;8, and 20 five-year-olds, mean age 5;9) were asked to produce opposites for common terms (e.g. ‘big’). In Experiment 2 children (27 four-year-olds, mean age 4;8; 23 five-year-olds, mean age 5;9) were asked to make pictures corresponding to statements phrased as negations (e.g. The arrow is NOT pointing up). In Experiment 3, children were asked to evaluate a series of pictures made by ‘another child’ using materials and procedures similar to those used in Experiment 2. Preschool children made use of predicate dimensionality when producing negations but could accurately evaluate truth-values regardless of content. Children often recalled negated items as affirmations (usually corresponding to antipodal opposites), which suggests that children's use of predicate dimensionality contributes to non-classical processing.

The utterance The man fell down because he slipped on a banana peel is a verbal statement in which causation is stated directly, and the major events are not reported in the perceptual order of occurrence. Surprisingly, in retelling 20 ‘stories’, 23 nursery-school children often refused to produce sentences in which causation was stated directly, but readily retold causationimplied utterances; performance was worst for unrelated (control) stories. Moreover, backward temporal order hurt performance only when causation was stated directly. Except for this latter condition, memory was best for the first half of the stories regardless of the temporal arrangement of the clauses. Finally, the majority of the story events were reproduced in the linguistic order in which they had been originally presented.

English has a word-minimality requirement that all open-class lexical items must contain at least two moras of structure, forming a bimoraic foot (Hayes, 1995).Thus, a word with either a long vowel, or a short vowel and a coda consonant, satisfies this requirement. This raises the question of when and how young children might learn this language-specific constraint, and if they would use coda consonants earlier and more reliably after short vowels compared to long vowels. To evaluate this possibility we conducted an elicited imitation experiment with 15 two-year-old Australian English-speaking children, using both perceptual and acoustic analysis. As predicted, the children produced codas more often when preceded by short vowels. The findings suggest that English-speaking two-year-olds are sensitive to language-specific lexical constraints, and are more likely to use coda consonants when prosodically required.

We investigated production of lexical stress in children with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD), all monolingual Italian speakers. The mean age of the 16 autistic children was 5.73 years and the mean age of the 16 typically developing children was 4.65 years. Picture-naming targets were five trisyllabic words that began with a weak–strong pattern of lexical stress across the initial two syllables (WS: matita) and five trisyllabic words beginning with a strong–weak pattern (SW: gomito). Acoustic measures of the duration, fundamental frequency, and intensity of the first two vowels for correct word productions were used to calculate a normalised Pairwise Variability Index (PVI) for WS and SW words. Results of acoustic analyses indicated no statistically significant group differences in PVIs. Results should be interpreted in line with the exploratory nature of this study. We hope this study will encourage additional cross-linguistic studies of prosody in children's speech production.

Parameter setting is either precipitous (Gibson & Wexler, 1994) or it is gradual in response to input frequency (Yang, 2002, 2004). In this study, we compare these models against the empirical domain of subject and (direct) object drop in Mandarin. We conducted a corpus-based study of the speech of 47 Mandarin-speaking children aged 1;2–6;5, and their caregivers, from the CHILDES database. The results show that before age 1;8 all the children used null subjects and null objects in a target-like fashion, which reveals that the parameter that governs null topics is set from very early on, even if the presence of disambiguating evidence for [+Null Topic] patterns is low. Besides, children's ba constructions, which require an overt object, reliably included this object from the first occurrence although its frequency was scarce in the input. Our results indicate that the setting of certain parameters occurred early independently of the input.

This study is about the role of elicited verbal imitation in toddler word learning. Forty-eight toddlers were taught eight nonwords linked to referents. During training, they were asked to imitate the nonwords. Naming of the referents was tested at three intervals (one minute later [uncued], five minutes, and 1–7 days later [cued]) and recognition at the last two intervals. Receptive vocabulary, nonword repetition, and expressive phonology were assessed. The accuracy of elicited imitation during training predicted naming at one and five minutes, but not 1–7 days later. Neither nonword repetition nor expressive phonology was associated with naming over time but extant vocabulary predicted performance at all time intervals. We hypothesize that elicited imitation facilitates word learning in its earliest stages by supporting encoding of the word form into memory and allowing practice of the articulatory-phonological plan. At later stages, vocabulary facilitates integration of the word form into the lexical network.

The present study examined the speech production of three-year-old Korean–English bilingual (KEB) children. English and Korean stops, as well as front vowels in both languages, were compared acoustically among the KEB children, then also measured against those of their age-equivalent monolingual counterparts. Evidence of distinctive phonetic categorization in bilingual children was more salient in vowels than in stops. Vowels and stops produced by the bilingual children were not significantly different from those of their monolingual counterparts. The findings suggest that, similar to other language domains, two linguistic systems are apparent in the phonetic production component of three-year-old KEB children, but that phonetic distinctiveness in production may not emerge holistically in an across-the-board fashion, appearing earlier in vowels than stops. Thus, the phonetic production systems of the two languages may develop with only limited interaction in simultaneous KEB children exposed to two languages at an early age.

Preposition knowledge is important for academic success. The goal of this project was to examine how different variables such as English input and output, Spanish preposition score, mother education level, and age of English exposure (AoEE) may have played a role in children's preposition knowledge in English. 148 Spanish–English children between 7;0 and 9;11 produced prepositions in English and Spanish on a sentence repetition task from an experimental version of the Bilingual English Spanish Assessment Middle Extension (Peña, Bedore, Gutierrez-Clellen, Iglesias & Goldstein, in development). English input and output accounted for most of the variance in English preposition score. The importance of language-specific experiences in the development of prepositions is discussed. Competition for selection of appropriate prepositions in English and Spanish is discussed as potentially influencing low overall preposition scores in English and Spanish.

Collocations, e.g., apples and pears, hard worker, constitute an important avenue of linguistic enquiry straddling both grammar and the lexicon. They are sensitive to language experience, with adult L2 learners and children learning English as an Additional Language (EAL) exhibiting poor collocational knowledge. The current study piloted a novel collocational assessment with children (mean age 6;3, 40 monolingual, 32 EAL). It investigated (1) the feasibility of a collocational assessment at this age, (2) whether collocational knowledge is associated with other language domains (receptive grammar and vocabulary), and (3) whether collocational knowledge is more affected than other domains. The assessment demonstrated good psychometric properties and was highly correlated with performance in other domains, indicating shared psycholinguistic mechanisms. Unlike adult counterparts, the EAL children performed equally poorly across domains. Given the role played by collocations in vocabulary development and reading, a focus on this domain may be beneficial for EAL children.

There is considerable controversy over the factors that shape infants’ developing knowledge of grammar. Work with artificial languages suggests that infants’ ability to track statistical regularities within the speech they hear could, in principle, support grammatical development. However, little work has tested whether infants’ performance on laboratory tasks reflects factors that are relevant in real-world language learning. Here we tested whether the language that infants hear at home, and their receptive language skills, predict their performance on tasks assessing the ability to learn non-adjacent statistical dependencies (NADs) at 15 months, and whether that in turn predicts sensitivity to native-language NADs at 18 months. We found evidence for some (though not all) of these relations, and primarily for females. The results suggest that performance on the artificial language-learning task reveals something about the mechanisms of grammatical development, and that females and males may be learning NADs differently.

Two young children were studied from the period when their expressive lexicons were approximately 30 words until they showed productive two-word positional patterns in their speech. Word combinations meeting the criteria for positional productive, positional associative and groping patterns were identified and the period during which the words appearing in these patterns were acquired was then determined. Words used in positional productive patterns had generally emerged in the children's speech before those used in associative or groping patterns. When several words that could play a particular semantic role (e.g. actor) were already well established in the child's lexicon, positional productive patterns that were somewhat broader in scope appeared as early as lexically based patterns.

Throughout this century observers have commented on the beginning talker's evident preference for words denoting ‘father’ over words representing the meaning of ‘mother’. Bateman (1917) said that ‘the most frequently named object is the paternal parent’. Leopold (1948) stated that ‘papa…appears far more commonly as the first meaningful word than does mama’. In this paper I will review some of the reported data on parent reference and propose a phonetic account of the child's evident preference for paternal terms.

In many of the world's languages grammatical aspect is used to indicate how events unfold over time. In English, activities that are ongoing can be distinguished from those that are completed using the morphological marker -ing. Using naturalistic observations of two children in their third year of life, we quantify the availability and reliability of the imperfective form in the communicative context of the child performing actions. On average, 30% of verbal descriptions refer to child actions that are grounded in the here-and-now. Of these utterances, there are two features of the communicative context that reliably map onto the functions of the imperfective, namely, that events are construed as ongoing and from within. The findings are discussed with reference to how the context in which a child hears aspectual language may limit the degrees of freedom on what these constructions mean.