We report three studies (one corpus, two experimental) that investigated the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Finnish-speaking children. Study 1 found that Finnish children's naturalistic exposure to RCs predominantly consists of non-subject relatives (i.e. oblique, object) which typically have inanimate head nouns. Study 2 tested…

Questions, just like plain declarative sentences, can give rise to multiple interpretations. As discussed by Spector & Egré (2015), among others, questions embedded under know are ambiguous between "weakly exhaustive" (WE), "intermediate exhaustive" (IE), and "strongly exhaustive" (SE) interpretations (for…

This study is about the role of elicited verbal imitation in toddler word learning. Forty-eight toddlers were taught eight nonwords linked to referents. During training, they were asked to imitate the nonwords. Naming of the referents was tested at three intervals (one minute later [uncued], five minutes, and 1-7 days later [cued]) and recognition…

Purpose: This study examined the relationship between semantic enrichment and naming in children asked to extend taught words to untrained exemplars. Method: Sixteen typically developing children ( M = 32.63 months, SD = 4.02) participated in 3 word learning conditions that varied semantic enrichment via iconic (shape, function) or point gesture.…

Nineteen shy, twenty-three middle and twenty-five non-shy junior kindergarten children were assessed at school by an unfamiliar examiner, and at home where their parents administered a parallel form of the expressive and receptive vocabulary tests given at school. A speech sample between the child and parent was also collected at home. Shy…

Relative importance of appearance and potential function in children's object naming was examined. First, 16 children, taught novel names for unfamiliar objects, had to decide whether these applied to items that resembled the training objects in appearance or potential function. Then the name training procedure was revised so that equal emphasis…

Examines whether certain reconstruction effects are present in child language. Points out an unexpected restriction on forward anaphora that is argued to be a case in which Principle C of the Binding Theory (Chomsky, 1981; 1986) operates at the reconstructed level. Results suggest that the ability to judge instances of forward anaphora and of…

One hundred short test items representing the style and grammatical usage of ten preschool age children were selected from large samples of their narrative and directive speech. Three groups of adults predicted successive words in an effort to reconstruct the actual vocabularies and grammatical forms of the utterances. The predictors' correct…

Presents a critical review of studies designed to teach language production skills to children with specific language impairment. The evidence reviewed suggests that a number of training approaches are effective, often resulting in gains that exceed the rate seen in normal development, provided the speaking situation resembles enough the training…

A set of predictions based on Reinhart's (1986) Theory of Relevance are evaluated against published results of tests of Binding Theory. Relevance Theory provides a means of understanding constraints on testing syntactic knowledge. Pragmatic factors must be systematically controlled in any evaluation of syntactic knowledge. (Contains 22…

There are reasons to believe that infant-directed (ID) speech may make language acquisition easier for infants. However, the effects of ID speech on infants' learning remain poorly understood. The experiments reported here assess whether ID speech facilitates word segmentation from fluent speech. One group of infants heard a set of nonsense…

Presents evidence that young children's comprehension of the locatives "in", "on", and "under" is, at least in part, contextually determined. Children were given tasks with verbal instructions which were either contextually congruent or incongruent. Results are interpreted in terms of the non-linguistic as well as linguistic strategies apparently…

Two studies are described that investigated preschool children's sensitivity to relative clauses as barriers to the movement of "wh" questions. A cross-sectional study and a longitudinal study conducted over the course of one year found that young children refused to extract "wh" questions from the ungrammatical site inside a…

The validity of mean length of utterance (MLU) and a measure of syntactic complexity were tested against the language assessment, remediation, and screening procedure on spontaneous speech samples from 87 children, concluding that MLU is a valid measure of clausal complexity up to 4:5 and that the measure of syntactic complexity is more valid at…

By analyzing different language tests currently in use for elementary school children, the article criticizes psychometric means of evaluation and ideas about language and language acquisition resulting from psychometric evaluation. (Text is in French.) (CLK)