This study investigates how "phonological neighborhood density" (PND) affects word production and recognition in 4-to-6-year-old Russian children in comparison to adults. Previous experiments with English-speaking adults showed that a dense neighborhood facilitated word production but inhibited recognition whereas a sparse neighborhood…

Considers children's understanding and use of contrast in language, including discussion of the role contrast plays in adult speech, the kinds of contrast commonly exemplified, and possible tests for sameness or difference of meaning. (CB)

Maternal infant-directed speech in Mandarin Chinese and Turkish (two mother-child dyads each) was examined to see if cues exist in input that might assist infants' assignments of words to lexical and functional item categories. Results show that sets of distributional, phonological, and acoustic cues distinguishing lexical and functional items are…