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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

While there are always differences in children’s input, it is unclear how often these differences impact language development – that is, are developmentally meaningful – and why they do (or do not) do so. We describe a new approach using computational cognitive modeling that links children’s input to predicted language development outcomes, and can identify if input differences are potentially developmentally meaningful. We use this approach to investigate if there is developmentally-meaningful input variation across socio-economic status (SES) with respect to the complex syntactic knowledge called syntactic islands. We focus on four island types with available data about the target linguistic behavior. Despite several measurable input differences for syntactic island input across SES, our model predicts this variation not to be developmentally meaningful: it predicts no differences in the syntactic island knowledge that can be learned from that input. We discuss implications for language development variability across SES.

Little is known about the productive morphosyntax of Norwegian children with developmental language disorder (DLD). The current study examined morphosyntax in Norwegian-speaking children with DLD (n =19) and a control group that was pairwise matched for age, gender, and intelligence quotient (IQ; n = 19). The children’s sentence repetitions were studied through the lens of Processability Theory. The group differences were largest for grammatical structures at the latest developmental stage of the processability hierarchy. The Norwegian subordinate clause word order, belonging to the latest stage of the processability hierarchy, stood out as particularly challenging for children with DLD. Only 2 children with DLD but 16 children in the control group produced a subordinate clause with subordinate clause word order. Categorization of children’s errors revealed that children with DLD made more errors of all types (addition, omission, substitution, inflection and word order) but especially errors of omission and inflection.

Two general classes of particle may be recognized in Japanese: those with syntactic function, and those which express emotions and desires. The former can be divided into three types: CASE (Kakujoshi), CONJUNCTION (Setsuzokujoshi), and ADVERBIAL (Fukujoshi).

The Hebrew Parent Questionnaire for Communication and Early Language (HPQ-CEL) was administered by 154 parents of Hebrew-speaking toddlers aged 1 ; 0 to 1 ; 3 (77 boys, 77 girls). The Questionnaire guided parents in observing and rating their toddlers in six contexts at home. The study aimed to identify inter-correlations between toddlers' non-linguistic behaviors that co-occur during the transition to speech. Seven communicative behaviors were extracted from the questionnaire data: Crying, Vocalizations, Collaboration with Adults, Pointing, Words, Joint Engagement in a Peek-a-Boo Game, and Triadic Interaction in Book Reading. Collaboration with Adults and Triadic Interaction in Book Reading yielded more significant correlations than other prelinguistic behaviors. Participation in social games and book-reading activities was associated with the toddlers' number of words at the period studied.

While voicing contrasts in word-onset position are acquired relatively early, much less is known about how and when they are acquired in word-coda position, where accurate production of these contrasts is also critical for distinguishing words (e.g., dog vs. dock). This study examined how the acoustic cues to coda voicing contrasts are realized in the speech of 4-year-old Australian English-speaking children. The results showed that children used similar acoustic cues to those of adults, including longer vowel duration and more frequent voice bar for voiced stops, and longer closure and burst durations for voiceless stops along with more frequent irregular pitch periods. This suggests that 4-year-olds have acquired productive use of the acoustic cues to coda voicing contrasts, though implementations are not yet fully adult-like. The findings have implications for understanding the development of phonological contrasts in populations for whom these may be challenging, such as children with hearing loss.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Finnish is a language with simple syllable structure but rich morphology. It was investigated whether syllables or morphemes are preferred processing units in early reading. To this end, Finnish first- and second-grade children read sentences with embedded inflected target words while their eye-movements were registered. The target words were either in essive or inessive/adessive (i.e., locative) case. The target words were either non-hyphenated, or had syllable-congruent or syllable-incongruent hyphenation. For the locatives, the syllable-incongruent hyphenation coincided with the morpheme boundary, but this was not the case for the essives. It was shown that the second-graders were slowed down by hyphenation to a larger extent than first-graders. However, there was no slowdown in gaze duration for either age group when the syllable-incongruent hyphen was morpheme-congruent. These findings suggest that Finnish readers already utilize morpheme-level information during the first grade.