The aim of this study was to investigate the acoustic vowel space area in infant directed speech (IDS). The research question is whether the vowel space is expanded or remains constant in IDS. A corpus of spontaneous interactions of 9 dyads followed monthly from the age of 6 to 24 months was analyzed. The occurrences in the parents’ speech of each word that the children eventually acquired were extracted. The surface of the vowel triangle and the convex hull of all vowels were computed. The main result is that the development of the vowel space in IDS follows an inverted U-shaped curve: the vowel space starts relatively small, gradually increases as the child’s first word use approaches, and decreases again afterwards. These findings show that parents adapt their articulation to the evolving linguistic abilities of their child, and this adaptation can be detected at the level of individual lexical items.

The present study investigates flexibility of verb use in the early stages of English multiword development, and its relationship with patterns attested in the input. The data is taken from a case study of a monolingual English-speaking boy aged 2 ; 5–2 ; 9 and his mother while engaged in daily activities in the home. Data were coded according to Halliday's (1975) functional system. The findings suggest that early multiword verb use is functionally restricted and closely tied to verb use in the input.

A critical question in the study of language development is to understand lexical and syntactic acquisition, which play different roles in speech to the extent it would be natural to surmise they are acquired differently. As measured through the comprehension and production of closed-class words, syntactic ability emerges at roughly the 400-word mark. However, a significant proportion of the developmental work uses a coarse combination of function and content words on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (MB-CDI). Using the MB-CDI Wordbank database, we implemented a factor analytic approach to distinguish between lexical and syntactic development from the Words and Sentences (WS) form that involves both function words and the explicit categorizations. Although the Words and Gestures (WG) form did not share the factor structure, common WG/WS elements recapitulate the expected age-related changes. This parsing of the MB-CDI may prove simple, yet fruitful in subsequent investigation.

To investigate the influence of semantic/pragmatic variables on children's production of verb-phrase anaphora (VPA), a spoken sentence completion task (e.g. John is throwing a ball and … Mary is too) was administered to four-, seven- and ten-year-olds. The frequency of VPA production was affected by whether the two clauses had the same or different polarity and by whether the actions were portrayed as simultaneous or sequential. These effects interacted in complex ways with age and with the presentation order of the polarity types. We speculate that developmental changes in the influence of semantic/pragmatic factors may be linked to increases with age in the strength of syntactic priming effects.

Processes by which children interpret homonyms were examined. Participants were 16 two- and three-year-olds, 32 four-year-olds, 32 seven-year-olds and 32 ten-year-olds. Each child individually was asked to interpret keywords from stories read aloud by an examiner. Keywords were homonyms, nonsense words, or unambiguous words. For the three older groups, response times (RTs) to unambiguous words were significantly shorter than RTs to homonyms and nonsense words, when interpretations for all three-word types were consistent with the story contexts. Seven-year-olds had longer RTs for homonyms versus nonsense words. RTs did not vary among responses to homonyms. Four- and seven-year-olds had longer RTs for inappropriate, versus appropriate, nonsense-word interpretations. The number of cues recalled from a story about a keyword did not differ across appropriately versus inappropriately interpreted homonyms, but did differ across appropriately versus inappropriately interpreted nonsense words. These findings have implications for understanding how children arrive at literal interpretations of homonyms.

This study investigated how Korean toddlers’ perception of stop categories develops in the acoustic dimensions of VOT and F0. To examine the developmental trajectory of VOT and F0 in toddlers’ perceptual space, a perceptual identification test with natural and synthesized sound stimuli was conducted with 58 Korean monolingual children (aged 2–4 years). The results revealed that toddlers’ perceptual mapping functions on VOT mainly in the high-pitch environment, resulting in more successful perceptual accuracy in fortis or aspirated stops than in lenis stops. F0 development is correlated with the perceptual distinction of lenis from aspirated stops, but no consistent categorical perception for F0 was found before four years of age. The findings suggest that multi-parametric control in perceptual development guides an acquisition ordering of Korean stop phonemes and that tonal development is significantly related to the acquisition of Korean phonemic contrasts.

This study explores whether children can learn a structural processing bias relevant to pronoun interpretation from brief training. Over three days, 42 five-year-olds were exposed to narratives exhibiting a first-mentioned tendency. Two characters were introduced, and the first-mentioned was later described engaging in a solo activity. In our primary condition of interest, the Gesture Training condition, the solo-activity sentence contained an ambiguous pronoun, but co-speech gesture clarified the referent. There were two comparison conditions. In the Gender Training condition the characters were different genders, thereby avoiding ambiguity. In the Name Training condition, the first-mentioned name was simply repeated. Ambiguous pronoun interpretation was tested pre- and post-training. Children in the Gesture condition were significantly more likely to interpret ambiguous pronouns as the first-mentioned character after training. Results from the comparison conditions were ambiguous: there was a small but non-significant effect of training, but also no significant differences between conditions.

This study investigates the development of metalinguistic skills, particularly ambiguity detection, and whether training accelerates this development for prereaders in kindergarten (5;5–6;6). It is the first to compare homophone detection with lexically ambiguous sentence detection in which the same homophones appear. The experimental group received ambiguity detection training; the control group received vocabulary training. Results showed that there is a spontaneous development of homophone detection abilities at the end of kindergarten, and training may accelerate this trajectory. The development of lexical ambiguity detection is not apparent in kindergarteners. However, explicit training improves this trajectory significantly. The knowledge of both meanings of a homophone is not sufficient to report both meanings of a sentence that contains that homophone. We propose that detecting the dual meanings of an ambiguous sentence involves sentence processing operations and an ability to think flexibly about language that may be enhanced with training.

Our motivation was to examine how toddler (2;6) and adult speakers of American English prosodically realize information status categories. The aims were three-fold: 1) to analyze how adults phonologically make information status distinctions; 2) to examine how these same categories are signaled in toddlers’ spontaneous speech; and 3) to analyze the three primary acoustic correlates of prosody (F0, intensity, and duration). During a spontaneous speech task designed as an interactive game, a set of target nouns was elicited as one of three types (new, given, corrective). Results show that toddlers primarily used H* across information status categories, with secondary preferences for deaccenting given information and for using L+H* for corrective information. Only duration distinguished information status, and duration, average pitch, and intensity differentiated pitch accent types for both adults and children. Discussion includes how pitch accent selection and input play a role in guiding prosodic realizations of information status.

Children from language minority (LM) environments speak a language at home that differs from that at school, are often from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds, and are at risk for reading impairment. We evaluated the main effects and interaction of language status and phonological memory and awareness on reading disorder in 352 children from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. A significant phonological memory by language status interaction indicated that phonological memory problems were magnified in predicting reading impairment in children from LM versus English dominant (ED) homes. Among children without reading disorder, language minority status was unrelated to phonological processing.

Two groups of children were given pictures of animals to name as quickly as they could. The groups comprised 40 nursery aged children (mean age 3 ; 11) and 40 Year 2 children (mean age 6 ; 9) attending primary school in London. The 30 animals were presented one by one, on cards, and any errors made by the children were noted. Consistent with a similar object naming study with adults (Vitkovitch, Kirby & Tyrrell, 1996) and a study with children (Gershkoff-Stowe, 2002), picture naming errors referred to earlier named objects. However, while adults showed below-chance interference from objects that had only just been named (Lag 1), children were most susceptible to interference from very recently named objects (see also Gershkoff-Stowe, 2002). Furthermore, the proportion of younger children making Lag 1 errors was higher than the proportion of older children making Lag 1 errors. The results are discussed in relation to the activation levels of lexical representations.

An experimental study examined the comprehension of sentences containing concessive connectives, considered from an argumentative-conclusive point of view, in eight- and ten-year-old French children (24 subjects in each age group). Two tasks were used; subjects had to choose between (1) opposite preceding contexts of sentences (context choice task), and (2) conclusions that could be drawn from the same sentences (conclusion choice task). Results indicated a clear developmental increase in performance. For all concessive items, except mais (‘but’), results of the context choice task were better than results of the conclusion choice task. Older children gave significantly better responses for mais in the conclusion choice task. The ambivalence of the connective mais is discussed; comparisons with production and crosslinguistic data are suggested.

The way seven- and nine-year-old French children and adults interpret ambiguous object descriptions was studied in four experiments. All four experiments followed the same basic procedure and consisted of two phases. During the training phase, plastic blocks varying in shape, colour and size were associated with fruit names. Some objects were always given just one label, the generic term, whereas others could be given either the generic or the specific label. For example, large circles were referred to as ‘pommes’ (‘apples’), and large BLUE circles as ‘reinettes’ (a kind of apple). Still others were given no name at all. During the test phase of the experiment, subjects were presented with referentially ambiguous messages and asked to point to a given object (Experiments 1, 2 and 3) or to draw an object (Experiment 4). The messages consisted of either a generic term preceded by an article (e.g. ‘(la pomme’ – ‘the apple’) or a verbal description based on a colour adjective (e.g. ‘le bleu’ – ‘the blue one’). When presented with the generic term, older children and adults persistently chose the object for which no specific term had been given during the training phase. When presented with an adjective description, they chose the referent for which no fruit name had been given during the training phase. Younger children's choices depended on whether the article preceding the description was definite or indefinite. These results are consistent with the Gricean approach to referential communication proposed by Jackson & Jacobs (1982) and with an extended version of the principle of contrast proposed by Clark (1987, 1988).

This study investigates Mandarin-speaking children's knowledge of event semantics in interpreting spatial modifiers with zai ‘at’ after a posture verb or before a placement verb. The event-semantic principles investigated include subevent modification (Parsons, 1990) and aspect shift (Fong, 1997). We conducted an experimental study using modified forced choice, video choice, and elicited production techniques with five groups of children (two- to six-year-olds) and an adult control group. Three-year-olds were sensitive to the ambiguity of zai-PPs with placement verbs and posture verbs, suggesting guidance from principles of aspect shift and subevent modification. On the other hand, distributional properties of the input play a role in acquiring the interpretation and word order of zai: e.g., four-year-olds significantly differed from adults in accepting non-target V-zai sentences, as some verb classes can take postverbal prepositional phrases with zai while others cannot in adult usage.

The model under discussion was elaborated in response to our need to construct a general, explicit and integrative framework for the seemingly different strands of research that we and our associates have carried out in the last decade or so. The findings of these studies made it increasingly clear to us that it is impossible to account for the dramatic changes in language knowledge and language use in children and adolescents within the boundaries of current research paradigms in language acquisition. Our goal was thus to relate later language acquisition and children's increasing cognitive abilities to literacy development in a motivated way, focusing on germane themes in socio-linguistics and discourse analysis, on the one hand, and facets of written language, on the other.

This study examined the relations between receptive language development and other developmental domains of preschoolers from low-income families, through an inter-cultural perspective involving the United States and Turkey. A total of 471 children and their caregivers participated in Turkey, while 287 participated in the United States. Children's development was assessed using the Ages and Stages Questionnaire for both samples. Different versions of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test were used for Turkish and US samples, to measure receptive language development. Results revealed similar patterns, with some differences, between the two countries. Receptive language predicted only communication and personal–social scales in the Turkish sample, while the US children's receptive language skills were associated with communication, problem solving, personal–social, and fine and gross motor development scales. These results were discussed in the context of each country, and the comparative conclusions contribute to the extant literature by illustrating the importance of language for three domains.