Like verbs, adjectives pose a challenge to the young word learner in that some – like red, round, rough, or rectangular – map onto properties that are detectable through the senses, while others – like ready, reasonable, or required – express abstract properties that have no reliable, physical correlate. Even for those adjectives whose properties are observable, how does a child know that one particular property is being highlighted above all others? The physical environment alone will not suffice. Just as with verbs, the child learning adjectives is faced with an inherent indeterminacy of meaning, which can only be resolved through the incorporation of cues originating from multiple sources.

When Roger Brown selected Adam, Eve and Sarah to be the first three participants in the modern study of child language, one of the criteria was the intelligibility of their speech (Brown, 1973). According to the prevailing view at the time, accuracy of pronunciation was a peripheral phenomenon that had nothing to do with the development of language qua language. So why not study children who were easy to transcribe? One reason why not, according to Stoel-Gammon (SG; this issue), is that the difficulty of accurately producing sounds influences the words children acquire and the rate at which they acquire them. (It's true that Roger Brown's focus was on the child's acquisition of morphosyntax, but articulation was assumed to be peripheral to everything back then.) This interaction between the articulatory skill of children and phonological properties of words is just one of the mutual influences between phonology and the lexicon SG describes. In her target article, SG brings together data from a wide range of investigations to build an account of how phonology and the lexicon interact in development.

The present study compared the performance of twenty-seven French-speaking internationally adopted (IA) children from China to that of twenty-seven monolingual non-adopted French-speaking children (CTL) matched for age, gender, and socioeconomic status on a Clitic Elicitation task. The IA children omitted significantly more accusative object clitics and made significantly more agreement errors using clitics than the CTL children. No other significant differences were found between the groups. The findings suggest that the adoptees may experience difficulties in morphosyntactic development possibly as a result of their delayed exposure to the adopted language.

Children use pronouns in their speech from the earliest word combinations. Yet, it is not clear from these early utterances whether they understand that pronouns are used as substitutes for nouns and entities in the discourse. The aim of this study was to examine whether young children understand the anaphoric function of pronouns, focusing on the interpretation of the pronoun it in English-speaking children at 1;6 and 2;0. We tested whether adults and children would prefer to look at a previously introduced vs. novel visual object depending on the argument form (it, the + noun, a + noun, or silence). Results demonstrate that, like adults, two-year-olds understand that it refers to a previously introduced referent. There is no evidence that this knowledge is established in children at 1;6. This suggests that some time between 1;6 and 2;0 children come to understand that it refers to a highly accessible referent introduced in the prior context.

Emotion can influence various cognitive processes. Communication with children often involves exaggerated emotional expressions and emotive language. Children with autism spectrum disorder often show a reduced tendency to attend to emotional information. Typically developing children aged 7 to 9 years who varied in their level of autism-like traits learned the nonsense word names of nine novel toys, which were presented with either happy, fearful, or neutral emotional cues. Emotional cues had no influence on word recognition or recall performance. Eye-tracking data showed differences in visual attention depending on the type of emotional cues and level of autism-like traits. The findings suggest that the influence of emotion on attention during word learning differs according to whether the children have lower or higher levels of autism-like traits, but this influence does not affect word learning outcomes.

Two studies assess French-speaking children's comprehension of object filler–gap dependencies, with the goal of investigating whether the degree of specificity/set-restriction of the fronted object or the intervening subject modulates comprehension. We tease apart the predictions of various accounts attributing children's difficulties to (i) similarities between the object and the intervening subject (Gordon et al., 2001, 2004), particularly when both constituents share a structural +NP feature (Friedmann et al., 2009); (ii) increased processing cost determined by an operation of set-restriction (Goodluck 2010); and (iii) the tendency to incrementally interpret sentences and the subsequent difficulty in revising an early commitment to an agent/subject-first analysis (Trueswell et al., 1999). Our results support the incremental processing view as they reveal that only a less specific fronted object, but not a less specific intervener, enhances comprehension. This suggests that referentially ambiguous objects alleviate children from an erroneous initial interpretive commitment to an agent/subject-first structure.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the acquisition of ditransitive structures beyond production. We conducted an elicitation task (production) and a picture-sentence matching task measuring accuracy and response times (comprehension). We examined German five-to seven-year-old typically developing children and an adult control group. Our data showed quasi-perfect performance in comprehension in adults and in those children who had already mastered ditransitives productively. However, children who had not yet mastered the production of ditransitives showed comprehension abilities preceding production abilities. Unlike adults, in the comprehension task children did not react explicitly before the end of the auditory stimulus.

The environmental context of verbs addressed by adults to young children is claimed to be uninformative regarding the verbs' meaning, yielding the Syntactic Bootstrapping Hypothesis that, for verb learning, full sentences are needed to demonstrate the semantic arguments of verbs. However, reanalysis of Gleitman's (1990) original data regarding input to a blind child revealed the context of single-word parental verbs to be more transparent than that of sentences. We tested the hypothesis that English-speaking children learn their early verbs from parents' single-word utterances. Distribution of single-word transitive verbs produced by a large sample of young children was strongly predicted by the relative token frequency of verbs in parental single-word utterances, but multiword sentences had no predictive value. Analysis of the interactive context showed that objects of verbs are retrievable by pragmatic inference, as is the meaning of the verbs. Single-word input appears optimal for learning an initial vocabulary of verbs.

Children’s exposure to talk about conceptual categories plays a powerful role in shaping their conceptual development. However, it remains unclear when parents begin to talk about categories with young children and whether such talk relates to children’s language skills. This study examines relations between parents’ talk about conceptual categories and infants’ expressive language development. Forty-seven parent-infant dyads were videotaped playing together at child age 10, 12, 14, and 16 months. Transcripts of interactions were analyzed to identify parents’ talk about conceptual categories. Children’s expressive language development was assessed at 18 months. Findings indicate that parents indeed talked about conceptual categories with infants and that talk was stable across time, with college-educated parents producing more than non-college-educated parents. Further, parents’ talk about conceptual categories between 10 and 16 months predicted children’s 18-month expressive language. This study sheds new light on mechanisms through which early experiences may support children’s language development.

In the present study, children's early ability to organise words into sentences was investigated using the Weird Word Order procedure with Spanish-speaking children. Spanish is a language that allows for more flexibility in the positions of subjects and objects, with respect to verbs, than other previously studied languages (English, French, and Japanese). As in prior studies (Abbot-Smith et al., 2001; Chang et al., 2009; Franck et al., 2011; Matthews et al., 2005, 2007), we manipulated the relative frequency of verbs in training sessions with two age groups (three- and four-year-old children). Results supported earlier findings with regard to frequency: children produced atypical word orders significantly more often with infrequent verbs than with frequent verbs. The findings from the present study support probabilistic learning models which allow higher levels of flexibility and, in turn, oppose hypotheses that defend early access to advanced grammatical knowledge.

Several aspects of early language skills, including parent-report measures of vocabulary, phoneme discrimination, speech segmentation, and speed of lexical access predict later childhood language outcomes. To date, no studies have examined the long-term predictive validity of novel word learning. We examined whether individual differences in novel word learning at 21 months predict later childhood receptive vocabulary outcomes rather than generalized cognitive abilities. Twenty-eight 21-month-olds were taught novel words using a modified version of the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm. Seventeen children (range 7–10 years) returned to participate in a longitudinal follow-up. Novel word learning in infancy uniquely accounted for 22% of the variance in childhood receptive vocabulary but did not predict later childhood visuospatial ability or non-verbal IQ. These results suggest that the ability to associate novel sound patterns to novel objects, an index of the process of word learning, may be especially important for long-term language mastery.

The present study investigated the roles of pattern detection capacities and understanding of intentions in children's learning of linguistic rules. We taught two-year-olds a Hebrew morphological distinction between noun and verb forms using two different training protocols. The protocols were identical in all parameters except that only in an Intentional, but not in a Control condition, were children introduced to the stimuli in an intentional communicative context. We found that children learned the morphological rule only in the Intentional condition. Thus, besides their pattern detection capacities, children's understanding of intentions substantially boosts their learning of meaningful rules.

A description is given of the CHILDES/BIB database, its contents, and its relationship to the CHILDES database. CHILDES is a depository of child language corpora, and the publisher of CHAT (a transcription manual), and CLAN (an electronic package for child language research). CHILDES/BIB is an electronic bibliographic database that is an autonomous unit of CHILDES.

An extensive fuzzy boundary was identified within the adult extension of two exemplary object-words, ‘dog’ and ‘ball’. The fuzzy boundaries were incorporated into the standard of adult extension against which the preschool child's use of ‘dog’ and ‘ball’ was compared, and the investigation provided a framework in which children's responses to fuzzy boundary referents could be accommodated. Responses to fuzzy boundary referents were considered as having precedents within adult extension and the data revealed the provision of precedents for a significant number of the young child's applications and non-applications of the words. The investigation concluded that, through adherence to an oversimplified concept of adult extension, previous research has underestimated the degree of correspondence that exists between child and adult extension.

What does the word chair mean? How does the category of objects bearing this name differ between adults and pre-school children? And how does the knowledge of a possible function of an object affect subjects' judgements? Answers to these questions were sought by means of sorting and rank ordering tasks. Subjects were shown drawings of a variety of objects on which one could sit, and were asked to indicate which ones they would call chairs. Those objects so judged to be category members were rank ordered for degree of typicality (or ‘best example’) by a paired-comparisons procedure. Half the subjects saw drawings of the objects alone, while the others saw a person sitting on each object. The results revealed that adults consistently judged some objects to be better examples than others, and that the provision of function information affected the judgements in a characteristic way. A different, less stable typicality structure was found in the children's category. Function cues caused the children's rank order judgements to change greatly. These findings are discussed within the framework of some recent theories of lexical concept formation in young children, and in relation to recent work on the nature of internal representations.