Examines how children understand the argumentative function of the French connective meme (even). Two completion tasks, related to the argumentative properties of the morpheme, were used: 1) to infer the conclusion of an "even" sentence, and 2) to infer the argument position. (34 references) (Author/CB)

Investigation of French mothers' (N=6) use of pronouns to refer to their infants during free play showed that third- and first-person pronouns occurred more often in the context of affect-oriented activities than in goal-directed activities. Second-person pronoun usage occurred more frequently in goal-directed activities. (Author/CB)

Compares frequencies of cooccurrences in infant babbling between phonetic and contextual categories to expected frequencies, and considers deviations to be patterns in babbling. Results are provided of an examination of utterances of three Canadian-English and three Parisian-French infants whose babblings were transcribed and categorized according…

Compares the prosodic modifications in mothers' and fathers' speech to preverbal infants in American and British English, French, German, Japanese, and Italian. Speech samples were instrumentally analyzed to measure mean fundamental frequency, variability, utterance, duration, and pause duration. (67 references) (Author/CB)

Many recent generativist models attribute grammatical knowledge to young children on the basis that children's language patterns the same way as the target adult language. It has been proposed that the child acquires this knowledge early on in development by a process of parameter setting. Wexler (1996) presents the "Very Early Parameter Setting…

Cross-cultural investigation of the influence of target-language in infant babbling analyzed 1047 vowels produced by 10-month-olds (N=20) from French, English, Cantonese, and Arabic language backgrounds. Results revealed differences among infants across language backgrounds, with the differences paralleling those found in adult speech in the…

Analysis of negative utterances from English-, French-, and Korean-speaking one- through three-year-olds identified nine distinct semantic/pragmatic categories with a similar developmental order in all three languages. Different patterns were found in the form-function relationship for the different categories. (Author/CB)

Phonological awareness is thought to become increasingly analytic during early childhood. This study examines whether the proposed developmental sequence (syllable[right arrow]onset-rime[right arrow]phoneme) varies according to the characteristics of a child's native language. Experiment 1 compares the phonological segmentation skills of English…