The hypothesis explains the early lexical development of children and the predictions of this hypothesis are shown to be consistent with available data on overextension. (Author/NCR)

This article clarifies the position taken in the Greenfield and Smith book (1976), including relation to speech act theory, and elucidates some general theoretical issues in early language development. (Author/NCR)

A discourse analysis of sixty French children aged ten to twelve from two socioeconomic groups. The object of the study was to describe the syntactic-semantic functioning of their language in an "abstract" situation and to determine the degree of influence of socio-cultural factors. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Analyses of longitudinal speech data collected from two children indicated that children rapidly acquire count/mass noun distinctions. (Author/CB)

This research explored the defining characteristics of first- and third-grade children in conceptualizing 17 American kin terms. The data indicate that even when children were able to identify a relationship, they did not all base their identification on the same attributes. (Author/RM)

Analysis showed that the majority of subjects applied a coherent strategy to three-word utterances presented in different word orders, and confirmed the existence of two primitive strategies. (Authors/CB)

Research supported in part by a Public Health Service grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Development. (VM)

Research supported in part by a National Science Foundation Grant. (VM)

Presents a linguistic analysis of malaproprisms produced by children. (MM)

In order to determine (1) the major speech characteristics of mothers and fathers and (2) the relationship between parental input and child language development, a longitudinal analysis of parents' input language was conducted during the period in which four first-born children progressed from no words to the stable use of one-word utterances in…

Kindergarteners without number conservation ability were found to rely on the nonlinguistic strategy of choosing the greater amount in tasks requiring the choice of more and less. Mature semantic knowledge of "more" was found to precede that of "less." (Author)

Studies the perceptual relationship between temporal "before" and "after" and their spatial counterparts. Adults reported temporal "before" related to spatial "after" and temporal "after" related to spatial "before." Three-year old children better understood spatial "after" and spatial "before," suggesting a temporal/spatial semantic acquisition…

Examines the hypotheses about how print represents the speech that preliterate children select when they receive input compatible with several such hypotheses. Results indicate that most preliterate children do not select phonologically based hypotheses, but instead focus on morphophonology and/or semantic aspects of words' referents. (40…

Investigates the extent to which a representation of relative force can account for children's understanding of epistemic modals when their logical meaning is considered. Results confirm the influence of relative force and suggest that deductive inference is an early semantic component of modal terms. (29 references) (Author/CK)