This is the first study to report how children's language skills and mothers' book-reading strategies, measured at 2;0, predict mastery of word inflections at 3;0 and 5;0 in a sample of 66 Finnish children. Three theoretical models were tested on the longitudinal data using path analyses. The testing of the models suggests direct developmental continuity from producing words and multiword utterances on later inflectional growth, but indirect effects of maternal strategies on language outcomes. Moreover, mothers' complex expansions and questions are positively related, whereas labellings and corrections are negatively related, to children's concurrent and subsequent language skills. Finally, vocabulary size relates negatively to maternal attention regulation. When joint attention is easily built up in the dyad, mothers concentrate more on direct reading, which, together with the child's vocabulary, predicts mastery of inflections. In conclusion, the results can be viewed as support for a child-driven view on the future course of language acquisition.

The present study examined gender and age patterns of diminutive use in conversations between 32 Spanish-speaking Peruvian mothers and their three- and five-year-old children. Results confirm previous findings concerning both parents' greater use of diminutives with younger children and children's early acquisition of this complex aspect of morphology. However, findings do not support previous studies on gender differences in parental use of diminutives with young children. Results also revealed that mothers' and children's imitations of their interlocutors' diminutized words promoted their interlocutors' overall diminutive use. This finding highlights the acute sensitivity of both speakers to each others' language and the potential role of imitation in older children's language development.

Evidence from experimental studies of Spanish children's production of determiners reveals that they pay more attention to phonological cues present in nouns than to natural semantics when assigning gender to determiners (Pérez-Pereira, 1991). This experimental work also demonstrated that Spanish children are more likely to produce the correct determiner when given a noun with phonological cues which suggest it is masculine, and more likely to assign masculine gender to nouns with ambiguous cues. In this paper, we investigate the phonological cues available to children and seek to explore the possibility that differential frequency in the linguistic input explains the priority given to masculine forms when children are faced with ambiguous novel items. A connectionist model of determiner production was incrementally trained on a lexicon of determiner–noun phrases taken from parental speech in a longitudinal study of a child between the ages of 1;7 and 2;11 (López Ornat, Fernandez, Gallo & Mariscal, 1994) preserving the type and token frequency information. An analysis of the database of parental productions revealed that while regular feminine nouns were slightly more frequent than regular masculine nouns, irregular masculine nouns outnumbered irregular feminine nouns by roughly 2 to 1. On the basis of this, we made the prediction that as the training lexicon builds up, the network will perform better overall on masculine determiners than would be predicted from their forms alone and will tend to assign masculine gender to ambiguous novel nouns in a test set. The findings indicate that, at least in the case of Spanish gender agreement for determiners and nouns, a general associative learning mechanism can account for important characteristics of the acquisition process seen in children.

The aim of the current study was to determine the degree to which a sample of one child's creative utterances related to utterances that the child previously produced. The utterances to be accounted for were all of the intelligible, multi-word utterances produced by the child in a single hour of interaction with her mother early in her third year of life (at age 2;1.11). We used a high-density database consisting of 5 hours of recordings per week together with a maternal diary for the previous 6 weeks. Of the 295 multi-word utterances on tape, 37% were ‘novel’ in the sense that they had not been said in their entirety before. Using a morpheme-matching method, we identified the way(s) in which each novel utterance differed from its closest match in the preceding corpus. In 74% of the cases we required only one operation to match the previous utterance and the great majority of these consisted of the substitution of a word (usually a noun) into a previous utterance or schema. Almost all the other single-operation utterances involved adding a word onto the beginning or end of a previous utterance. 26% of the novel, multi-word utterances required more than one operation to match the closest previous utterance, although many of these only involved a combination of the two operations seen for the single-operation utterances. Some others were, however, more complex to match. The results suggest that the relatively high degree of creativity in early English child language could be at least partially based upon entrenched schemas and a small number of simple operations to modify them. We discuss the implications of these results for the interplay in language production between strings registered in memory and categorial knowledge.

This study investigated whether crosslinguistic interference occurs in the domain of subject realization in Spanish in a bilingual acquisition context. We were also interested in exploring whether the source of the interference is due to child-internal crosslanguage contact between English and Spanish, as is commonly assumed, or due to the nature of the language input in a bilingual family, a factor which has not typically been considered in studies of crosslinguistic influence. The use of subjects in a null subject language like Spanish is a phenomenon linked to the pragmatics/syntax interface of the grammar, and thus, is a domain where crosslinguistic interference is predicted to be likely to occur in bilingual acquisition (Müller & Hulk, 2001). Using spontaneous language data available from CHILDES (www.childes.psy.cmu.edu), we examined the use of overt subjects in Spanish by two Spanish monolingual children (ages: 1;8–2;7 and 1;8–1;11) one Spanish–English bilingual child (age 1;9–2;6) and their parental interlocutors. We looked at the proportions of overt versus null subjects as well as the discourse-pragmatic contexts of overt subject use by the children in order to uncover bilingual/monolingual differences in the distributional properties and the functional determinants of subject realization. We also looked at identical variables in the speech of the children's parental interlocutors to investigate the potential influence of the input on the children's output. Our results suggest that the bilingual child showed patterns in her subject realizations in Spanish that could be interpreted as due to crosslinguistic effects from English; however, there is also evidence that these effects may have a source in the input, rather than resulting from internal crosslanguage contact. While our data do not permit us to distinguish conclusively between these two possible sources, they indicate that future research on crosslinguistic influence in bilingual acquisition should take input into account.

This study examined the distribution of two Hebrew nominal structures – N–N compounds and denominal adjectives – in spoken and written texts of two genres produced by 90 native-speaking participants in three age groups: eleven/twelve-year-olds (6th graders), sixteen/seventeen-year-olds (11th graders), and adults. The two constructions are later linguistic acquisitions, part of the profound lexical and syntactic changes that occur in language development during the school years. They are investigated in the context of learning how modality (speech vs. writing) and genre (biographical vs. expository texts) affect the production of continuous discourse.

Participants were asked to speak and write about two topics, one biographical, describing the life of a public figure or of a friend; and another, expository, discussing one of ten topics such as the cinema, cats, or higher academic studies. N–N compounding was found to be the main device of complex subcategorization in Hebrew discourse, unrelated to genre. Denominal adjectives are a secondary subcategorizing device emerging only during the late teen years, a linguistic resource untapped until very late, more restricted to specific text types than N–N compounding, and characteristic of expository writing. Written texts were found to be denser than spoken texts lexically and syntactically as measured by number of novel N–N compounds and denominal adjectives per clause, and in older age groups this difference was found to be more pronounced. The paper contributes to our understanding of how the syntax/lexicon interface changes with age, modality and genre in the context of later language acquisition.

Three experiments investigated the role of oppositional predicate dimensionality in four- and five-year-old children's processing of negation. In Experiment 1 children (37 four-year-olds, mean age 4;8, and 20 five-year-olds, mean age 5;9) were asked to produce opposites for common terms (e.g. ‘big’). In Experiment 2 children (27 four-year-olds, mean age 4;8; 23 five-year-olds, mean age 5;9) were asked to make pictures corresponding to statements phrased as negations (e.g. The arrow is NOT pointing up). In Experiment 3, children were asked to evaluate a series of pictures made by ‘another child’ using materials and procedures similar to those used in Experiment 2. Preschool children made use of predicate dimensionality when producing negations but could accurately evaluate truth-values regardless of content. Children often recalled negated items as affirmations (usually corresponding to antipodal opposites), which suggests that children's use of predicate dimensionality contributes to non-classical processing.

Structural analyses of developing lexicons have provided evidence for both children's holistic lexical representations and sensitivity to phonetic segments. In the present investigation, neighbourhood analyses of two children's (age 3;6) expressive lexicons, maternal input, and an adult lexicon were conducted. In addition to raw counts and frequency-weighted counts, neighbourhood size was calculated as the proportion of the lexicon to which each target word is similar, to normalize for vocabulary size differences. These analyses revealed that children's lexicons contain more similar sounding words than previous analyses indicated. Further, neighbourhoods appear denser earlier in development relative to vocabulary size, presumably because children first learn words with more frequent sounds and sound combinations. Neighbourhood density as a proportion of the size of the lexicon then decreases over development as children acquire words with less frequent sounds and sound combinations. These findings suggest that positing fundamentally different lexical representations for children may be premature.

Gender agreement elicitation was used with Russian children to examine how diminutives common in Russian child-directed speech affect gender learning. Forty-six children (2;9–4;8) were shown pictures of familiar and of novel animals and asked to describe them after hearing their names, which all contained regular morphophonological cues to masculine or feminine gender. Half were presented as simplex (e.g. jozh ‘porcupine’) and half as diminutive forms (e.g. jozhik ‘porcupine-DIM’). Children produced fewer agreement errors for diminutive than for simplex nouns, indicating that the regularizing features of diminutives enhance gender categorization. The study demonstrates how features of child-directed speech can facilitate language learning.