Discusses a longitudinal study of young children's acquisition of complex sentences for expressing their beliefs about causally related events, in the transition in language development from simple to complex syntax. While most of the children's statements expressed subjective meaning overall, the acquisition of syntactic connectives was…

Two experiments used the preferential looking task to assess early word comprehension in 12- to 24-month olds. Results indicated that when target stimuli were named, 12-month olds displayed an increase in target looking for typical--but not atypical--targets, whereas 18- and 24-month olds displayed increases for both. (Author/KB)

Reports on two studies that examined the natural process of word learning in children 4-11 years old. The children hear the new words in a conversation, a story, and paired with a definition. Results indicate that children at all ages could acquire a partial semantic representation from a single exposure. (SED)

Describes a study to determine: (1) the relationship between age and mean length of utterance measured in morphemes (MLU) in a group of normally developing two- and three-year-old chidren; (2) the standard error of MLU; (3) the relationship between MLU and age; and, (4) the ability of MLU to predict children's grammatical development. (SED)

People of ages 4, 6, 8, 10, 20 and 70 years named pictures selected to represent the entire range of lexical consensus among 20-year-olds. Consensus within each group increased with age, up to 20. Data indicate words coding culturally important events are acquired earliest. (CHK)

The study investigated the ability of 60 children, age 6-8, to monitor grammaticality in the past progressive, perfect progressive, and perfect verb forms. Children achieved a significantly higher rate of accurate judgments monitoring grammatical forms than ungrammatical forms. Context surrounding ungrammatical verb forms and child's age…

Examined the language skills of 21 6-year olds selected for linguistic precocity as toddlers, finding that verbal abilities and reading achievement remained high from age 2 through 6. Also found that phonological awareness appeared to emerge as a consequence, rather than a cause, of early reading. (31 references) (MDM)

This study examined the social labels which are first used by infants, social differentiation on the basis of labeling behavior, and overgeneralization of social labels. Subjects were 81 infants from 9 to 36 months of age. The 9- to 24-month-olds were shown slides of themselves, their mothers, their fathers, and unfamiliar children, babies, and…

In order to test the hypothesis that the ability to form verbal concepts would increase with age, a test for verbal concept formation was developed and administered to 668 children between the ages of 4 and 9. By varying sentences that describe nonsense figures, 4 variables were systematically explored. (MS)

Two studies were conducted, one to judge the relative ages of pairs of vocalizations from Chinese and American infants of varying ages, the other to judge the linguistic community of the vocalizer when age was held constant. Judgments were highly accurate in the first study, but not in the second. (Author/RM)

Investigated developmental change in symbolic representational ability by examining infants' imitation of vocalizations, words, visible motor actions, and nonvisible motor behaviors at ages 10, 13, 17, and 21 months. Results revealed a pattern of increasing imitation, supporting the view that a domain-independent representational capacity develops…

Data from 48 infants revealed (1) that infants aged 1;2-2;3 failed to establish a stable word-object link even in follow-in labeling and (2) that only infants aged 1;6-1;7 could identify the correct referent during discrepant labeling. During the period between 1;2-1;7 infants are becoming increasingly adept at acquiring new labels under minimal…

A study of the babbling and phonological development of 54 infants used half-hour videotape recordings of the children at play in their own homes. The vocal output was phonetically transcribed twice for interrater agreement, and analyzed for the consonants used five times or more in the child's vocal repertoire. These consonants were considered to…

The effect of verbal labeling in a serial position short term memory task was investigated. Forty female college students were given 16 trials each. Eight trials involved only central items which had to be recalled. The other eight trials involved both central and incidental items. Half of the subjects verbalized the names of the central items as…

Discourse and conversational analysis methods were used in a qualitative reconstruction of one aspect of the regularities in the way 61 children "do" personal reference. Of particular interest was the development of two reference forms: minimization--preference for simple (one word) forms, or recipient design--reference forms indicating…