Discusses children's acquisition of non-nominal, abstract words and argues that the use of these words parallels the child's cognitive development in trial-and-error problem solving and in development of insight. (EKN)

Children listened to stories which contained anomalies produced by violating semantic restrictions or based on conflicting propositions at two points in a story. The capacity to detect violations of sentences developed more rapidly than detection of violation of discourse. Children's developing capacity to integrate and store story structure is…

The author describes two approaches to the development of talk in early childhood--behavioristic, which provides instruction in specific skills of grammar and vocabulary, and the approach which encourages the development of meaning rather than refining the structure of speech. (KC)

Research addressing development of mechanistic models capable of acquiring languages on the basis of exposure to linguistic data is reviewed. Research focuses on major issues in developmental psycholinguistics--in particular, nativism and empiricism, the role of semantics and pragmatics, cognitive development, and the importance of simplified…

A neural model in the form of a servo-mechanism is developed to account for certain aspects of language and speech in the human nervous system. Emphasis is placed on encoding processes as well as on-going feedback during production. (SW)

This article examines the role of capacity limitations in working memory for children with specific language impairment (SLI). Preliminary findings support the contention that capacity constraints play a role in language disorders and that variations in the presentation rate of linguistic models affect the ability of children with SLI to learn new…

Presents the goals of the Plunkett and Marchman (PM) connectionist model of the acquisition of verb morphology, and responds to related criticisms. Claims that small vocabulary size allows young children to correctly produce both regular and irregular past tense forms, and that non-linearities in vocabulary growth are a contributing factor to the…

This introductory article discusses following articles that consider how phonology interacts with other aspects of language and language learning and the role of this interaction in language acquisition. It addresses the interaction between phonology and the lexicon, phonological representations and morphophonemic alternations, and the interaction…

Cross-linguistic investigation of the importance of syntactic cues and cue processing cost in French and Spanish four through six-year-olds' sentence comprehension revealed that topological cues helped French subjects most, while local cues helped Spanish subjects most. (Author/CB)

A longitudinal study of four 17- to 33-month-olds revealed that their linguistic selection at the one-word stage was governed by principles of informativeness, while the two-word stage was characterized by new, or a combination of new and old, information. (Author/CB)

This study investigated four- and six-year-olds' support pursuing the role of positive evidence in the acquisition of the knowledge of lexical features such as the control status of individual verbs. Findings seem to be compatible with a claim that grammatical knowledge is instantaneous. (Contains 24 references.) (Author/LB)

Examines mothers' discourse in joint picture book reading in terms of the level of abstract thought it requires the child to make and compares this with language used in an interactive, product-oriented task, modelling a clown using play-doh. (39 references) (GLR)

In a response to an article by Cleary, the literature on C-Testing is reviewed and the influence of Klein-Bradley is noted. It is concluded that, although C-Testing may be a legitimate device of first-language testing, it lacks a theoretical basis for application with second-language learners. (12 references) (Author/LB)

Addresses three major issues related to conscious and unconscious learning: incidental and intentional learning, attention and noticing, and implicit and explicit learning. All three point to the importance of awareness when learning a language. An annotated bibliography is included. (80 references) (LET)

Reviews textbook which focuses on disorders of language processing that can be viewed as generated by specific language impairments (SLI). Highlights the book's examination of root causes which may contribute to developmental language disorders for all components of language processing, as well as the interaction between the disorders. Finds the…