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.

Acoustic-phonetic exaggeration of infant-directed speech (IDS) is well documented, but few studies address whether these features are modified with a child's age. Mandarin-speaking mothers were recorded while addressing an adult and their child at two ages (0 ; 7–1 ; 0 and 5 ; 0) to examine the acoustic-phonetic differences between IDS and child-directed speech (CDS). CDS exhibits an exaggeration pattern resembling that of IDS – expanded vowel space, longer vowels, higher pitch and greater lexical tone differences – when compared to ADS. Longitudinal analysis demonstrated that the extent of acoustic exaggeration is significantly smaller in CDS than in IDS. Age-related changes in maternal speech provide some support for the hypothesis that mothers adjust their speech directed toward children as a function of the child's language ability.

Researchers have long been puzzled by children's variable omission of grammatical morphemes, often attributing this to a lack of semantic or syntactic competence. Recent studies suggest that some of this variability may be due to phonological constraints. This paper explored this issue further by conducting a longitudinal study of five English-speaking one- to two-year-olds' acquisition of articles. It found that most children were more likely to produce articles when these could be produced as part of a disyllabic foot. However, acoustic analysis revealed that one child initially produced all articles as independent prosodic words. These findings confirm that some of the variable production of articles is conditioned by constraints on children's early phonologies, providing further support for the Prosodic Licensing Hypothesis. They also hold important implications for our understanding of the emergence of syntactic knowledge.

The present study investigated three-year-olds' sensitivity to direct and indirect cues to others' knowledge states for word learning purposes. Children were given either direct, physical cues to knowledge or indirect, verbal cues to knowledge. Preschoolers revealed a better ability to learn words from a speaker following direct, physical cues to their knowledge state. Implications for children's emerging pragmatic competence are discussed.

This paper reports on partial knowledge in two-year-old children's learning of the regular English plural. In Experiments 1 and 2, children were presented with one kind and its label and then were either presented with two of that same kind (A→AA) or the initial picture next to a very different thing (A→AB). The children in A→AA rarely produced the plural. The children in A→AB supplied the singular form of A but children in A→AA did not. Experiment 3 compared the performance of English-speaking and Japanese-speaking children in A→AA with common and novel nouns. The Japanese-speaking children (learning a language without a mandatory plural) supplied the singular form of A but the English-speaking children did not. The findings indicate young children learning English know there is a plural to be learned before they have fully worked out the rules of production or acquired the necessary singular–plural pairs for broad generalization.

This paper examines children's attention to cross-situational information during word learning. Korean-speaking children in Korea and English-speaking children in the US were taught four nonce words that referred to novel actions. For each word, children saw four related events: half were shown events that were very similar (Close comparisons), half were shown events that were not as similar (Far comparisons). The prediction was that children would compare events to each other and thus be influenced by the events shown. In addition, children in these language groups could be influenced differently as their verb systems differ. Although some differences were found across language, children in both languages were influenced by the type of events shown, suggesting that they are using a comparison process. Thus, this study provides evidence for comparison, a new mechanism to describe how children learn new action words, and demonstrates that this process could apply across languages.

Infants at 1 ; 2 demonstrate difficulty in accessing subtle phonetic information about newly learned word–object pairings (Stager & Werker, 1997). In this study, we examined whether or not infants can access subtle prosodic information such as lexical stress in a word learning task. We tested infants younger than 1 ; 2 to see if they could learn two new word–object associations that differ only in stress pattern (Sww versus wSw). Our results are the first to demonstrate that, even without contextual support, infants at 1 ; 0 succeed at this task, suggesting that the salient acoustic properties associated with lexical stress facilitate word–object associative learning.