This paper presents the results of two experiments which appear to show that children's linguistic generalizational biases change from a semantically based system to a syntactic-structural system. The experiments use the constituent repetition paradigm of Read & Schreiber (1982). Subjects were trained to repeat the subject noun phrase in orally presented sentences. Preschoolers, but not second-graders, displayed a tendency to repeat the agentive noun phrase (contained in the by-phrase) in semantically irreversible passive sentences. It is argued that the results provide more evidence for a semantic-relational bias in children's early grammars, and that the results also provide support for the notion that children's generalizational biases shift from a semantic relational basis to a syntactic-structural basis some time between the preschool and early grammar school years.

When asked to write an utterance, nursery children and kindergartners often produce strings of unrelated characters. We analysed whether these invented writings reflect similarities and differences in the phonetic and semantic aspects of the utterance. One hundred and twenty Israeli children were asked to write pairs of nouns that share a syllable (e.g. pe ‘mouth’ and perach ‘flower’) and series of sentences that share either mainly nouns or mainly verbs. The older the children, the more their invented writing reflected common linguistic elements and length of utterance. Similarities and differences on the word level were represented at a younger age than those on the syllabic level. Nouns were represented in children's written productions earlier than verbs and adverbs. Invented writing was interpreted as a linguistic act, drawing on the semantic, syntactic and phonological levels of language.

Developmental differences in object word learning and use were investigated. Two groups of infant speakers: Beginner (vocabularies under 50 words) and Advanced (vocabularies over 50 words), participated in a concept formation and word learning and generalization experiment. Results indicated that both speaker groups formed concepts of and learned words for the to-be-learned objects, and generalized these words. However, Advanced speakers learned more concepts and words, and engaged in broader generalization than Beginner speakers. The following variables did not account for these developmental differences: child age, object permanence development, maternal speech, child action on objects. These findings can be explained by developmental differences in both the number and kind of object concepts formed in the second year. Words were primarily acquired for object concepts by both speaker groups. However, Beginner speakers formed fewer concepts, thus having a less extensive conceptual base supporting word learning. This may account for their lower levels of vocabulary acquisition. Additionally, Beginner speakers appear to form prototype/exemplar-based object concepts, leading to limited word extension, while Advanced speakers form featurally based object concepts, leading to broader extension.

An experiment is described which investigates preschool children's understanding of temporal terms. Children aged 2;11 to 4;5 were required to act out situations described by sentences containing before and after. One set of sentences used both a simplified task and simplified materials. These sentences were simple commands, and they only required the children to act out the situation described by the main clause in order to demonstrate comprehension. Performance with these sentences was superior to performance with sentences like those of Clark (1971) and Grain (1982). In addition, children only used an order-of-mention strategy with the Clark sentences. With both the Clark and the Grain sentences, there were more omissions of the subordinate clause in before sentences than in after sentences. There was also a tendency, with these two types of sentence, for children to act out only the first clause in before sentences.

Four studies are reported in which young children's response time to detect word targets was measured. Children under about six years of age did not show the response time advantage for accented target words which adult listeners show. When semantic focus of the target word was manipulated independently of accent, children of about five years of age showed an adult-like response time advantage for focussed targets, but children younger than five did not. It is argued that the processing advantage for accented words reflects the semantic role of accent as an expression of sentence focus. Processing advantages for accented words depend on the prior development of representations of sentence semantic structure, including the concept of focus. The previous literature on the development of prosodic competence shows an apparent anomaly in that young children's productive skills appear to outstrip their receptive skills; however, this anomaly disappears if very young children's prosody is assumed to be produced without an underlying representation of the relationship between prosody and semantics.

Will adults whose native language is English and children whose native language is Spanish follow the same strategies in acquiring the category of noun gender and its functions in Spanish? This investigation shows that there are significant differences in first- and second-language acquisition. Performance on five tasks eliciting responses containing gender agreement was measured for two groups. Results suggest that there is a developmental progression in acquisition of noun gender for both groups. Nevertheless, on tasks containing grammatical and/or semantic conflict, even the linguistically least-experienced adults reflected correct, adult-like strategies for Spanish gender agreement, whereas only the oldest children performed in this manner.

The present study examined the types of linguistic knowledge that affect children's ability to understand and produce novel compounds in Hebrew. Sixty children aged 3;0–9;0, and 12 adults, were asked to interpret and to produce novel Noun + Noun compounds. Their comprehension was in advance of their production. In comprehension, morphological form of head nouns had little effect: from age four, children did equally well on all the compound forms tested; they identified head nouns and also possible relations between heads and their modifiers. In production, though, knowledge of morphological form was crucial. The fewer the changes children had to make in the forms of head nouns, the earlier they mastered that compound pattern. Finally, children who produced novel compounds correctly were also able to interpret novel compounds, but not vice versa.

This study examined the effect of two linguistic factors on children's understanding of idioms. Kindergarten, first, third and fourth graders listened to idiomatic expressions either alone or at the end of short story contexts. Their task was to explain verbally the intended meanings of these idioms and then to choose the correct idiomatic interpretations of these phrases. The results showed that in the presence of supporting context younger children (kindergarten and first graders) understood idioms that were syntactically frozen (e.g. turn back the clock) better than they did idioms which can be seen in a variety of syntactic forms (e.g. lay down the law). Older children (third and fourth graders) comprehended both kinds of idiom equally well. Moreover, with context, children at all grade levels were better at explaining the figurative meanings of idioms whose literal and idiomatic interpretations were closely related (e.g. hold your tongues) than they were at explaining idioms whose literal and figurative meanings were not closely related (e.g. beat around the bush). Without context there were few significant differences noted in children's understanding of the different kinds of idiom. The significance of these findings for developmental models of idiom comprehension is discussed.

The productive narrative competence of three young children as revealed in their spontaneously occurring conversations recorded over an 18-month period during their kindergarten and grade one years was investigated. Almost 90 hours of the children's conversations, produced as they were being driven to and from school, were audiotaped and analysed in order to determine whether children between the ages of five and seven include narrative accounts in their conversations with each other and, if so, the nature of the narrative language produced. The subjects were found routinely and regularly to produce a striking variety of narrative forms; 14 different narrative types were distinguished and defined, six of which have not previously been reported in the literature on children's narratives. Seventy per cent of the recorded narratives took anecdotal form; original fantasy narratives occurred only rarely. A significant proportion of the narratives were collaboratively created.

The connective and has frequently been described as a useful allpurpose connective that is used as a vehicle for introducing new inter-sentential semantic relationships. As new and more specific connectives are acquired, they are matched to these meanings. An assumption is that as children get older, and should be used less to express the various meanings for which more specific connectives exist; rather, it should be increasingly reserved for simple co-ordination. This hypothesis was tested by examining narratives produced by children between 4 and 9 years old; contrary to expectation, and was used no differently by 9-year-olds than by 4-year-olds, and simple co-ordination constituted no more than 20% of the relationships. The role of and may be to indicate cohesion between sentences, without regard to semantic relationship.

This paper's authors examine the interpretation of transitive sentences with varying word orders /SVO, OVS, SOV, OSV/. The subjects were Hungarian-Russian bilingual preschool children and their Hungarian and Russian monolingual peers. Bever's ‘first noun as agent’ strategy – as indicated by OVS and OSV errors – appears to be weaker in the bilinguals. An explanation for this is proposed in terms of Slobin's ‘attention to the end of words’ factor. The mistaken identification of sentence-initial objects as agents depends on case marking allomorphy. Bilinguals, in general, appear to pay more attention to allomorphy and thus make fewer interpretation errors than their monolingual peers.