Re-analysis of data regarding children's acquisition of tense and aspect indicated that children learning Polish were influenced by aspect in acquiring verb tense in the same way as children were influenced in learning other languages. Children beginning to learn verb inflections found aspectual contour particularly compelling in leading them to…

Examination of parental responses to their young children's (N=3) inflectional over-regularizations and wh-question auxiliary-verb omission errors suggested that two of the children's parents followed ill-formed utterances with expansions and clarification questions. Such corrective responses dropped out of children's input as they continued to…

A study of two- to six-year-olds' spontaneous uses of "from" to mark oblique agents showed that, while the two-year-olds produced "from" for agents and "with" for instruments in imitation, older subjects shifted to "by" for agents and kept "from" to mark locative sources. (Author/CB)

Examination of the speech of eight mothers and eight fathers to their one- to two-year-olds (N=8) indicated that, while paternal speech was not more diverse than maternal speech, paternal speech did show greater use of rare vocabulary and lower use of common vocabulary. (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)

Compares patterns of cluster realization from 47 children ranging in age from 3;4 to 6;8 with functional (nonorganic) speech disorders with those reported in the literature for normal acquisition and reveals that these patterns are essentially the same for both groups. (33 references) (GLR)

Examines whether systematic differences exist in babbling and first words of infants from different language backgrounds (English, French, Japanese and Swedish) and asks whether differences result from the phonetic structure of the languages. Statistically significant differences discerned in the babbling phonetic selection indicates that phonetic…

Provides evidence for developmental changes in the composition of the lexicon, reflecting a shift in emphasis from reference, to predication, to grammar. Findings show that the study of qualitative variation in lexical style is confounded by quantitative variation in rate of lexical development. Tables are appended. (Contains 42 references.) (JP)

Reports a case study of a British 2-year old that shows a stage in syntactic development without a subject agreement protection but with a tense phrase. A sharp contrast in use of verb forms suggests that the child had left the Optional Infinitive stage and entered a transitional stage, where the major development is that the status of the bare…

Investigates the cross-linguistic patterns of the overgeneralization of the intransitive/transitive alternations found in children's speech and provides new evidence from findings based on the acquisition of French. The morphosyntatic characterization of such phenomena in English and Hebrew child language is followed by a description of the…

Examines issues relating to similarity neighborhoods of words in children's lexicons. Young children's receptive vocabularies were analyzed for three-phoneme, four-phoneme and five-phoneme words. The pattern of the original results from Charles-Luce & Luce (1990) was replicated. (18 references) (Author/CK)

Examines naturalistic adult-to-child speech of Italian middle class mothers to determine which patterns characterize linguistic input to infants. Because Italian is a pro-drop language, adult-to-child speech revealed bias toward more salient semantic and morphological significance of verbs relative to nouns, and verbs will likely occupy…

The durational characteristics of novel words produced in repeated trials were evaluated in separate groups of children with, and without speech delay (SD). Children produced disyllabic novel words containing either a trochaic or iambic stress pattern. Results of acoustic analysis indicated a significant interaction between trial number and…

The interaction between prosodic and segmental aspects of infant representations for speech was explored using the head-turn paradigm, with untrained everyday familiar words and phrases as stimuli. At 11 months English-learning infants, like French infants (Halle & Boysson-Bardies, 1994), attended significantly longer to a list of familiar lexical…

This study examined the effects of being born very preterm on children's early language development using prospective longitudinal data from a representative regional cohort of 90 children born very preterm (gestational age less than 33 weeks and/or birth weight less than 1,500 grams) and a comparison sample of 102 children born full term…