Within child language acquisition research, there has been a fair amount of controversy regarding children's knowledge of the grammatical properties associated with verbal inflection (e.g., tense, agreement, and aspect). Some researchers have proposed that the child's early grammar is fundamentally different from the adult grammar, whereas others…

Language and vocabulary represent the very foundation of learning to read and write. Children who do not develop strong oral language skills and vocabulary in these early years will find it difficult to keep pace with their peers. Children use the natural medium of language for thinking. Those who acquire a substantial vocabulary are often able to…

This paper investigates the acquisition of prosodic words in European Portuguese (EP) through analysis of grammatical and statistical properties of the target language and child speech. The analysis of grammatical properties shows that there are solid cues to the prosodic word (PW) in EP, and the presence of early word-based phonology in child…

In the current debate about the abstractness of children's early grammatical knowledge, Tomasello & Abbott-Smith (2002) have suggested that children might first develop "weak" or "partial" representations of abstract syntactic structures. This paper attempts to characterize these structures by comparing the development of constructions around…

One of the tasks of language learning is the discovery of the intricate division of labour between the lexical-semantic content of an expression and the pragmatic inferences the expression can be used to convey. Here we investigate experimentally the development of the semantics-pragmatics interface, focusing on Greek-speaking five-year-olds'…

This paper investigates object omission in French longitudinal production from two English-speaking children (Lightbown, 1977). Similar patterns of object omission are observed: direct objects start being dropped as transitive verbs are emerging and licit and illicit null objects occur in all recordings thereafter. Moreover, the incidence of…

The present study reports preliminary findings on the elicitation strategies used by Thai and English caretakers when eliciting past event narratives from pre-schoolers. Ten Thai and ten English-speaking caretaker-child dyads were recruited from Bangkok, Thailand and from Sydney, Australia. Caretakers were asked to elicit past event narratives…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the predictive validity of a collection of prelinguistic skills measured longitudinally in the 2nd year of life to language outcome in the 3rd year in children with typical language development. Method: A collection of prelinguistic skills was assessed in 160 children early (M = 14.31 months; SD =…

Purpose: The results of recent survey studies suggest that speech-language pathologists base most of their clinical decisions on information they were taught during their graduate programs, their clinical experience, and the opinions of colleagues (T. Wolf & J. Balderson, 2005; R. Zipoli & M. Kennedy, 2005). This is contrary to the principles of…

Purpose: This paper is a personal reaction to Gillam and Gillam's treatise on evidence-based decision making in schools. This evaluation focuses principally on the costs and benefits of clinicians' search for external evidence, potential problems associated with efforts to grade that evidence, and the integration of this evidence with "internal"…

The CHAT transcription standard of the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES), the world's largest computer archive of child language data, is critiqued. CHAT is being considered as a possible standard for the field of child language as a whole. It is argued that CHAT is biased toward three views that are no longer current in the field: (1)…

In a study of features that seem to be typical of children's conversations, 10 Finnish preschool children's conversations were videotaped and audiotaped over a period of 10 hours. The children were taped in conversation, play, fairy tale, and eating situations. Among the findings are that all children enjoy playing with language, but some initiate…

This report describes an in-service education program offered to teachers at a rural northeastern Head Start program to help them assess children's overall development by looking at their level of language development. The program focused on the case conference, a forum in which coordinators, teachers, home visitors, and sometimes parents meet to…

A discussion of English native-language vocabulary acquisition in children takes a closer look at the assumption that vocabulary is learned by common association of word with event, focusing on the acquisition of verb meanings. The intuitive power of the view that words are learned by noticing real-world contingencies for their use is…

A discussion of English-speaking children's use of subjectless sentences contrasts the competence and performance explanations for the phenomenon. In particular, it reviews evidence indicating that the phenomenon does not reflect linguistic competence, but rather performance constraints. A tentative model of children's production is presented…