This study examined whether pragmatic ordering factors account for the apparent preference for ANIMATE-INANIMATE (AI) order in passive and active sentences. If so, learning noun order relations in NNV sequences with an INANIMATE PATIENT + ANIMATE AGENT (It's the drum the boy plays) should be more difficult than with an ANIMATE PATIENT + ANIMATE AGENT (It's the girl the boy chases). Seventy children aged 3;0 to 5;3 were trained with either AAV or IAV exemplars, and then tested for their noun order in NNV utterances when describing animate agent + animate patient and animate agent + inanimate patient pictures. As judged by post-training performance, AAV and AIV training had comparable effects at age three, but IAV resulted in better learning at ages four and five. It was argued that the latter benefited from the correlation between animacy and subject in English sentences.

This study focuses on children who go through a ‘silent’ period early in the course of second language development, during which they largely cease verbal communication with speakers of the second language (English). Video recordings with radio microphones under natural conditions revealed that most of these children engaged in extensive private speech, which they were found to use for a variety of intrapersonal learning strategies, including (1) repetition of others' utterances, (2) recall and practice, (3) creation of new linguistic forms, (4) paradigmatic substitution and syntagmatic expansion, and (5) rehearsal for overt social performance. Quantity and quality of private speech was related not only to the children's level of cognitive development and the difficulty of the learning task (confirming previous research), but also to the children's social orientation and learning style, and to the domain of knowledge (language) that was being acquired.

This study investigated the degree to which cue validity, as estimated from textual analyses, predicts the actual strength of grammatical cues as they are used by speakers of Hebrew. An experiment was conducted to determine the differential strengths of the linguistic cues employed by Hebrew speakers when assigning the role of patient in sentences. Monolingual Hebrew-speaking subjects 4, 5, 7, and 9 years old, as well as adults, were tested using a sentence-picture verification task. Six cues were included in the study: word order, the accusative object marker, the reflexive noun phrase and three verbal derivations. By presenting subjects with sentences which set these cues in competition with one another, a measure of the strength of each cue was obtained. The results of a regression analysis revealed strong positive correlations between estimated cue validities and actual cue strengths for all but the youngest age groups. These results were interpreted as suggesting that cue validity is highly predictive of actual cue strengths. In addition, the strengths of the six cues varied as a function of the subject's age. Two additional factors were hypothesized to account for the performance of the older subjects: increased sensitivity to the reliability of cues and discourse-based constraints.

A new corpus of spontaneous conversations between adults and children is examined for evidence that adults simplify their vocabulary choices when speaking with young children. If these simplifications are found to be age-dependent, then they would broaden the pattern of simplifications characteristic of ‘motherese’ to include lexical choice as well. For the age-range newborns to 12 years, the results are both consistent with and contrary to the attested set of grammatical simplifications. In this corpus, MLU and TTR are strongly age-dependent, but adults do not choose their words from the 10,000 most common word-types in English in an age-dependent manner. Rather, the additional types for school-aged children come from the same part of the vocabulary and share the same-shaped distributions as in adult speech with preschool children and infants. This absence of an age-dependent accommodation in word choice has implications for models of child lexical acquisition which assume adult language accommodation.

This study determined what types of speech act 5– to 13-year-olds, and adults, would call Promising by asking questions following stories in which a speaker sometimes violated Searle's (1969) rules, by promising an event outside the speaker's control (PREDICTING) or by promising that a past action had been performed (ASSERTING). By 9 years of age children could distinguish between promising and predicting in terms of the speaker's responsibility for the outcome. 11- and 13-year-olds correctly said the speaker did not promise in cases of predicting, but only a few of them were correct for asserting. Even older children said the speaker did not promise when the promise was unfulfilled. Children do not think of promising as simply a speech act. The adult conception is closer to, but not the same, as Searle's.

Language has two mechanisms for creating new names from old words; combining morphemes and changing word meaning. Word compounds are clear cases of ‘combining’, metaphors of ‘changing’. A categorial framework for relating compounds and metaphors is presented and used in discussing aspects of their development. compelled and preferred compounds and metaphors are distinguished. Preferred compounds tend to serve the function of being conceptually precise, whereas preferred metaphors tend to serve ‘suggestive’ functions. Metaphoric compounds, which may integrate both functions, seem to be characteristic of middle childhood. Metaphors then may also acquire a language-learning function. It is suggested that the so-called literal stage, does not exist, but that the forms and functions of metaphor change in the course of development.

This study determined at what age and in what form children (aged 4;5 to 11;11) produce speech acts which commit them to some future action, by having them speak a doll's part in dialogues with the experimenter, who spoke for another doll. All children produced directive speech acts, indicating that the task was not too difficult for them, but only the commissive speech acts were analysed in detail. A majority of children at all ages produced at least one commissive speech act, but only the older children used the explicit performative verb promise to reassure the hearer of their commitment.

Little is known about children's acquisition of modality. It seems clear that at the age of five, when they are said to be linguistically competent, children have not mastered the adult system of modal meaning. This paper describes research which tests children's understanding of modal meaning at the ages of eight and twelve. The results of these tests are compared with the results of the same test on adult informants. The research uses the card-sorting method devised by Miller (1971) to investigate semantic similarities and dissimilarities; cluster analysis of the data reveals the underlying patterns. My tests revealed that eight-year-old children have only a rudimentary system of modal meaning, and even by the age of twelve a child's system will not be isomorphic with the adult system.

Three studies were carried out in order to account for development of word definitions. Study i was aimed at analysing the role of class inclusion skills and age (5– and 7–year-olds and adults) in production of definitions containing superordinate categorical terms. No differences were found between 7-year-olds who had passed a class inclusion task and those who had not passed it as regards number of definitions containing superordinates, while differences were found between younger and older children and between children and adults. Study 2 was aimed at obtaining some normative criteria on the ‘goodness’ of definitions provided in Study 1, by using adult judges. It was found that the best definitions are those which contain both categorical terms and specific information about the to-be-defined object. It was also found that adults may adjust their standard definitional criteria to the kind of interlocutor (i.e. a child or a Martian). Study 3 confirms that younger children's definitions fall far short of the adult informativeness and completeness criteria while, by the age of ten, such criteria are met. Overall results were interpreted as conforming to a progressive conventionalization of children's strategies for defining objects.

This cross-linguistic study investigates the relative importance of validity in terms of the strengths of syntactic cues and cue processing cost in sentence comprehension by French and Spanish children (4; 6–6; 6). The notion of cue cost refers to the distinction between local and topological processing types. Choices of the agent (cue strength) and latencies (cue cost) were collected through the acting out of sentences containing different syntactic cues. These cues (word order, clitic pronoun, verbal agreement plus accusative preposition a in Spanish) are ordered on a continuum from the most topological (word order) to the most local (preposition a). The analysis of cue strengths reveals that, while for French children a linguistic cue is all the stronger the more topological it is (verbal agreement < clitic pronoun < word order), for Spanish children a cue is all the stronger the more local it is (word order < clitic pronoun < verbal agreement < preposition a). The fact that Spanish children's latencies are always shorter (2150 msec) than those of French children (3110 msec) must be related to the effect of the preposition a which permits efficient role assignments with minimal cost. These results stress the importance of locality in sentence processing. On the other hand, a comparison with our similar adult cross-linguistic data demonstrates that the impact of cue cost changes over time.

The present investigation examined the relationship between attribute saliency and metaphor interpretation in school children. Ortony's theory that metaphors entail salience imbalance prompted the generation of two types of metaphors, PREDICATE-PROMOTING (PP) and PREDICATE-INTRODUCING (PI) metaphors. An adult sample was used to select metaphors of each type which were then presented to 24 children in each of grades three, five, and seven (mean ages 8; 5, 10; 6 and 12; 8). The children were asked to generate attribute lists for TOPIC and VEHICLE terms and, six weeks later, to verbally explain metaphors containing those terms. Older children correctly interpreted more metaphors than younger children, and at each grade level no difference was observed between the number of correct interpretations of PP and PI metaphors. In addition, at all grade levels the incorrect ground of each child's interpretation errors most often had been listed in his/her attribute lists. This suggests that attribute saliency for the individual perceiving the metaphor plays a key role in the interpretation process.

Goad & Ingram (1987) use the mere existence of inter-child variability to argue in favour of a ‘cognitive’, and against a ‘biological’ model of phonological development (Locke 1983). In this response it is suggested that such an argument fails to recognize the uniqueness of each individual's neural and vocal structures, ignores documented variability in the phonetic patterns of prelexical (and arguably prephonological) infants, and assumes–inexplicably–that inter-child variability implies the operation of ‘cognitive’ factors.