The spontaneous use of two deictic forms in the speech of Samoan children was examined. Recordings were made of four Samoan children interacting with their families at monthly intervals over a ten-month period. The children were approximately 2 years old at the start of the study. The speech elements examined were the particles signifying…

The form and function of conditional structures in the speech of English speaking children between the ages of 2;6 and 8 years were investigated. Two types of conditionals were distinguished: reality conditionals and unreality conditionals. Data were obtained from audiotapes of the subjects under naturalistic conditions. A five-stage acquisition…

This study examined word meanings in the single word period of language learning. Ten children were seen for 5 hours each month from the time they started learning language until their median length of utterance was 2.5 words. All the children's utterances, and the extralinguistic contexts of the utterances, such as objects and movements, were…

Children's acquisition of the mass-count distinction in English was investigated. In order to determine whether children approach the distinction as a morphosyntactic or a semantic distinction, 88 monolingual children aged 3-9 years were asked to judge the acceptability of 32 sentences containing "much" or "many" with 8 types of nominals. The…

Theories of the acquisition of word meaning among children are reviewed and a case study of one child is reported. Three models of how the young child associates words with underlying concepts and conventional meanings are noted. While one model proposes that children initially overextend word meanings, the other two models propose that new words…

Although Mandarin Chinese is a topic-prominent language, it is shown that young children acquiring Chinese as their first language access the concept of grammatical subject as well as that of topic. A total of 95 children aged 2-5 years acquiring Mandarin Chinese as their first language were tested on sentences involving equi-constructions. It was…

Language samples were gathered from two children, from several weeks after the first birthday of each child to the beginning of the child's two-word period (approximately 10 months). The children were observed and videotaped every two weeks, to obtain 33 continuous minutes of tape. Analyses focused on the question of whether or not the child uses…

This discussion argues that the development of children's definitions is shaped by a particular orientation to word meaning characteristic of literate language use. This orientation is marked by increased attention to the linguistic form of expressions. To test this argument, a study was undertaken in which eight common nouns, familiar to most…

A distinction is drawn between pragmatic and semantic meaning and a supporting discussion is presented. The hypothesis is then stated, that there are cases where semantic meaning of an utterance is learned as an abstraction from pragmatic meaning. Data from two experiments on a group of 63 preschool children are presented which provide empirical…

Two experiments investigated 4- to 5-year olds' understanding of semantic relations and methods for incorporating new words into their lexicon. In one experiment, 24 children were shown a picture of a container and told that an object called "X" was hidden inside it. Children were asked questions about the object X and about…

A case study of a 2-year-old progressing normally in speech development provides evidence of suprasegmental marking of the plural, thought to be adopted only in language-impaired children. Acoustic analyses of the durations and intensity of elicited words indicate that the child had adopted a suprasegmental strategy for marking the singular/plural…

Relationships between "combinatorial" abilities in language, symbolic play, blockbuilding, and non-semantic action sequences were explored in a study of 30 infants between 82 and 91 weeks of age. Subjects were observed in a laboratory playroom setting for approximately 45 minutes. During this time, a number of tasks were administered…

A major concern in recent research is whether perceptual or functional information is of primary importance in children's early word meanings. In the study described here, artificial objects were used so that form and function could be independently manipulated. There were 57 subjects, ranging in age from 2.5 years to adulthood. The subjects were…

Two studies addressed the relative strengths of object kind bias and syntactic knowledge in 2-year-olds' inductions of word meaning. The study looked at children's interpretations of novel proper names for familiar and unfamiliar objects. In each study, 10 children were assigned to each of 2 conditions (familiar and unfamiliar) and shown 2 cats…

The nature of semantic roles and grammatical relations are explored from the perspective of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG). It is proposed that unraveling the relational aspects of grammar involves the recognition that semantic roles fall into two types, thematic relations and macroroles, and that grammatical relations are not universal and are…