This review article presents evidence for the claim that frequency effects are pervasive in children's first language acquisition, and hence constitute a phenomenon that any successful account must explain. The article is organized around four key domains of research: children's acquisition of single words, inflectional morphology, simple…

Traditionally, acquisition of syntactic knowledge and the development of sentence comprehension behaviors have been treated as separate disciplines. This article reviews a growing body of work on the development of incremental sentence comprehension mechanisms and discusses how a better understanding of the developing parser can shed light on two…

Demonstrates the important need for language researchers to fill in the considerable theory data gap regarding the primary acquisition of Spanish by pointing out that theory development could be distorted if cross-linguistic comparisons of acquisition evidence draw on a faulty, incomplete data base. (CB)

The problems with using Piagetian theory to explore language-thought relationships are two-fold. First there are methodological problems, including the lack of experimental controls and the lack of uniform criteria by which cognitive operations are identified. A second difficulty is the questionable practice of interpreting child language…

Although interest in the language sciences was previously focused on newly created sentences, more recently much attention has turned to the importance of formulaic expressions in normal and disordered communication. Also referred to as formulaic expressions and made up of speech formulas, idioms, expletives, serial and memorized speech, slang,…

Attempts to demonstrate that specifically language-impaired (SLI) children can be viewed as normal learners faced with systematically altered input. By assuming SLI children are limited in their ability to perceive and hypothesize grammatical morphemes that are low in phonetic substance, many features of SLI children's language can be explained by…

Suggests that Goad & Ingram's (1987) argument in favor of a cognitive model of phonological development failed to recognize the uniqueness of each individual's neural and vocal structures, ignored documented variability in the phonetic patterns of prelexical infants, and inexplicably assumed that inter-child variability implied the operation of…

Looks at research and practice in the area of idioms and offers suggestions for teaching them effectively. (FL)

Two investigations of preschool children's relative dependence upon contextual and linguistic information to discriminate between speech acts revealed that younger subjects' discrimination of each speech act appeared relatively unaffected by reduction of linguistic information, while older subjects' performance was adversely affected. (Author/CB)

Discusses the language development in individuals with Down's syndrome in both early childhood and adulthood, and outlines intervention programs to assist language development in these individuals not only in their early years but throughout their lives. (71 references) (CFM)

The linguistic form of a nonliteral expression, and the context in which it occurs, can greatly influence young children's succcess or failure in assigning a meaning to a figurative expression. Experiments have shown that the same metaphorical expression can be easier to understand when expressed in a linguistic form that is familiar to young…

Surveys recent research in language acquisition, emphasizing the views of M. A. K. Halliday. (RL)

Reviews the second-language research on age-related differences, drawing conclusions regarding learning-age influence on initial acquisition rate and ultimate attainment level; sensitive periods of language development; cumulative age-related loss in ability; and the adequacy of affective, input, and current cognitive explanations for reduced…

In this book, current work and issues in psycholinguistics are reviewed by 19 noted authorities in the fields of psychology, linguistics, education, psychiatry, and medicine. The seven sections of the book discuss past and present issues in psycholinguistics (including controversial issues and the theoretical and historical roots of…

A review of research on the development of linguistic competence in second language learners looks at the role played by input to children in their development of linguistic competence, the nature of children's metalinguistic development, and the same processes in the naturalistic second language learning of adults, and then examines the role of a…