Critiques models of children's acquisition of the English past tense. Discusses the sequence of language development in a child and as predicted by a model, the purported U-shaped sequence of the development of children's past-tense usage, and children's overregularization and irregularization errors in past-tense usage. (BC)

Two experiments presented infants with artificial language input in which at least two generalizations were logically possible. The results demonstrate that infants made one of the two generalizations tested, the one that was most statistically consistent with the particular subset of the data they received. The experiments shed light on how…

Little is known about language development in school-age children in Asian countries. This research reports on 3 measures of language development in 100 Cantonese-speaking children age 5 to 9 years. Word scores, structure scores, and the mean length of communication units (MLCU) were derived from a story-retelling task. The structure score was…

In the "blocking-and-retrieval-failure" account of overregularization (OR; G. F. Marcus, 1995; G. F. Marcus et al., 1992), the claim that a symbolic rule generates regular inflection is founded on pervasively low past tense OR rates and the lack of a substantive difference between past tense and plural OR rates. Evidence of extended periods of OR…

This study utilized an electronic data linkage method to examine the effects of risk factors present at birth on language development in preschool. The Preschool Language Scale-3 (PLS-3) was administered to 853 low-income children, and cumulative risk data were abstracted from linked birth records. At least one risk factor was present in 94% of…

The spontaneous language sample forms an important part of the language evaluation protocol (M. Dunn, J. Flax, M. Sliwinski, & D. Aram, 1996; J. L. Evans & H. K. Craig, 1992; L. E. Evans & J. Miller, 1999) because of the limitations of standardized language tests and their unavailability in certain languages, such as Afrikaans. This study examined…

Two studies investigated how preschool children's interpretations of novel words as names for parts of objects were affected by 3 kinds of information: (a) whole object familiarity, (b) whole part juxtaposition, and (c) syntactic information indicating possession. Study 1 tested 3- to 4-year-olds and found that although there was evidence that all…

Truscott and Sharwood-Smith's (henceforth T&SS's) paper offers an interesting set of hypotheses about one possible processing perspective in research on language acquisition. What is striking about this exposition of their model is that it ignores almost entirely the context of previous research on this issue. Embedding their exposition in its…

A critical question about early word learning is whether word learning constraints such as mutual exclusivity exist and foster early language acquisition. It is well established that children will map a novel label to a novel rather than a familiar object. Evidence for the role of mutual exclusivity in such indirect word learning has been…

Every multicultural society has a language of power--the language spoken by members of the dominant group or groups--as well as languages that lack power because they are spoken by members of the subordinate group or groups. The ascension of one language over another has long been a source of controversy in Hawai'i, as it has in many parts of the…

This study examines inflectional abilities in French-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) using a verb elicitation task. Eleven children with SLI and age-matched controls (37-52 months) participated in the experiment. We elicited the "passe compose" using eight regular and eight irregular high frequency verbs matched for age…

This paper reports the results of an elicited production task of Long Distance (LD) "wh"-questions conducted with typically developing French- and Dutch-speaking children aged four and six, and adult control groups for each language. It is shown that besides input-convergent "wh"-questions, in both languages children use nontarget strategies to…

There is a surprising degree of overlapping structure evident across the languages of the world. One factor leading to cross-linguistic similarities may be constraints on human learning abilities. Linguistic structures that are easier for infants to learn should predominate in human languages. If correct, then (a) human infants should more readily…

Childhood experience with a language seems to help adult learners speak it with a more native-like accent. Can analogous benefits be found beyond phonology? This study focused on adult learners of Spanish who had spoken Spanish as their native language before age 7 and only minimally, if at all, thereafter until they began to re-learn Spanish…

The British Picture Vocabulary Scale, second edition (BPVS-II), a measure of receptive vocabulary, is widely used by speech and language therapists and researchers into speech and language disorders, as an indicator of language delay, but it has frequently been suggested that receptive vocabulary may be more associated with socio-economic status.…