Reports the findings of a cross-sectional study that investigated the acquisition of relative clauses by 27 Tamil-speaking children who ranged in age from 2 years and 11 months to 6 years and 6 months. A picture-cued production task was used to elicit relative clauses from the child subjects. (Author/VWL)

Examined Venezuelan children's developing abilities to use evaluative language in fictional and personal narratives. Looks at whether the use of evaluative language varies in fictional and personal narratives, there is a relationship between the use of evaluative language in these two narrative genres, and and the role children's age and…

Two experiments examined phonological priming in children and adults using a cross-modal picture-word interference task. Pictures of familiar objects were presented on a computer screen, while interfering words were presented over headphones. Results indicate that priming effects reach a peak during a time when articulatory information is being…

This study assesses children's understanding of the Italian modal verbs "dovere" (must) and "potere" (may) in their dual function of qualification of the speaker's beliefs (epistemic modality) and behaviour regulation (deontic modality). 192 children and 60 adults participated in the experiment. Children aged 3;0 to 9;2 were presented with two…

Examined how object shape, taxonomic relatedness, and prior lexical knowledge influenced children's overextensions (e.g., referring to pomegranates as apples). Researchers presented items that disentangled the three factors and used a novel comprehension task where children could indicate negative exemplars. Error patterns differed by task and by…

Tested preschool monolingual speakers of Spanish and English in their native countries on classification of familiar objects through a task assessing strategies in a free sort, a sort with instructions to use natural gender, and one for the Spanish speakers with instructions to use grammatical gender. Results suggest that instructional context and…

Examines cognitive development in 141 children (ages 5 to 8) and the use of pragmatic cues for anaphora resolution performed in verbal and puppet tasks with biased and neutral sentences. Violations of pragmatic constraint decreased with age and task, consistent with the perspective-shift model. Parallel function effects in neutral sentences were…

This paper investigates the development of interactive communication skills in 170 children aged 7 to 13. Results indicate that the development of interactive communication skills is rather different from the process of language acquisition both in the extended timescale involved and in the considerable variability exhibited by speakers of…

Garman (1974), reporting on 20 Tamil children aged 3 to 5, postulated a linguistic strategy and 2 prelinguistic strategies to explain results of a question-picture choice task involving sentences with embedded and subordinate clauses. Reanalysis of this data identifies four processing strategies and argues that certain grammatical sensitivities…

This paper explores "fast mapping", one of several processes that have been proposed to be involved in the rapid vocabulary expansion observed in the preschool years. An adaptation of a receptive word matching task examined how well children retained a just-mapped relation between word and referent when some information was later missing.…

Comprehension of relative clauses was assessed in 10 Hebrew-speaking school-age children with syntactic SLI and in two groups of younger children with normal language development. Comprehension of subject- and object-relatives was assessed using a binary sentence-picture matching task. The findings were that while Hebrew-speaking children with…

Analyzed the development of two morphological structures in Hebrew, one inflectional and the other derivational, and examined the mutual contribution of morphological knowledge and learning the written code. In a longitudinal design, 40 children were tested twice on two oral tasks--inflecting nouns for possession and deriving denominal…

Offers additional means of evaluating parent speech by examining frequencies of individual nouns, verbs, and descriptors, and examining the learning task presented to children. Study one examines transcripts from the CHILDES database of English-speaking parents' speech to children at five developmental levels; study two examines 50 transcripts of…

Twelve children (mean age 4;1) interacted with their mothers in 2 conversational settings to explore the percentage of topic incorporation and collaboration processes used by mothers and children in play and help settings. Although the help setting appeared to support collaborative action, the play setting permitted the dyads to be informative…