There are problems in interpreting the naming behavior of children. Children may misname a word because the word is absent from their vocabulary, because it is not yet firmly established, or because of a word retrieval or lexical assessing problem. Preliminary results are reported of an experimental technique designed to account for these…

Describes a study that investigates the order of acquisition of case-marked pronouns in Hebrew among 105 children between two and five years of age. Results indicate that children begin using case-marked pronouns as early as age two and that the stage of morphological development parallels that of English-speaking children. (SED)

This study explores children's development of dual-level phonological processing posited by generative theory for adult language users. Evidence suggesting 6-year-olds' utilization of morphophonemic segments was obtained by asking children to imitate complex words, omit specified portions, and discuss the meaning of the resulting word-parts. The…

The simultaneous acquisition of Italian and English by a child living in Italy, the son of an American mother and Italian father, is discussed by his mother. In particular, the development of his vocabulary is analyzed. (Text is in Italian.) (CFM)

Describes a study that examines the effect of an adult-child discourse structure on the word combination produced by 17 children at the single-word utterance level. There was a significant difference between pretest and posttest multiword production for the experimental group of six children, but no difference for the control group. (SED)

This case study of two Latvian children attempts to show how the parental terms for"mummy" and "daddy" in Latvian are acquired, paying particular attention to the changing relationship between the input and output forms during the acquisition process. (Author/RM)

A longitudinal study examining the role of imitation on children's lexical acquisition is discussed here. Findings did not support the view that imitation may enable new lexical items to be acquired, and it is noted that other functions of imitation in language acquisition should be explored. (CHK)

Traditionally linguists have considered pidgin languages as corrupted constructions of European vocabulary based on African or Asian syntax. Recent systematic studies of these languages show complex patterns of mutual influence on many levels. To explain the structural similarities of pidgin languages, some linguists, such as Keith Whinnom, have…

Attempts to determine whether children can use social-pragmatic cues to determine "what kind" of referent, object, or action an adult intends to indicate with a novel word. Doubts that children assume that a novel word refers to whatever nameless object is present. Suggests that lexical acquisition rests fundamentally on children's…

Examines whether knowledge of functional properties of a referent for a new name influences children's first guesses about whether that name refers to an object or a substance. Suggests that children do not rely on a single source of information, but rather draw on various kind of information, including perceptual characteristics of the entities…

This study investigated whether mothers' responses to their infants' gestures play a role in their infants' vocabulary development. Eight infants were observed interacting at home with their mothers on 2 occasions, when the infants were 10 to 12 months old, and 16 to 18 months old. Videotapes of the observations were transcribed and coded for…

In testing kindergartners and first graders in their comprehension of the words "before" and "after," it was found that when temporal terms are acquired, they are first used as prepositions and then as subordinating conjunctions. (Author/NCR)

Preschool children's comprehension of the adverbial modifiers "very" and "sort of" was experimentally investigated in 64 children. (Author/NCR)

This experiment used two groups of preschoolers and one group of young grade-schoolers to test for their comprehension of presuppositions and negation in complex syntax. (NCR)