Compared the effects of negative evidence versus positive input on the acquisition of irregular past-tense verb forms. Young children from two London nursery schools participated in a within-subjects design over five weeks. Results indicated that improvements in the grammaticality of child speech were considerably greater in cases where negative…

Two experiments examined infants' reliance on object shape versus color for word generalization to animate and inanimate objects. Infants were taught labels for either novel vehicles or novel animals using preferential-looking procedure or an interactive procedure. Results of both experiments indicated that infants limited their word…

Three studies tested the hypothesis that children's difficulty acquiring dimensional adjectives, such as big and little, is a consequence of how these words are used by adults. Findings indicated that children easily acquired novel dimension words when such words were used in a strictly comparative fashion, but had difficulty when also exposed to…

Reviews the hypothesis, "phonological bootstrapping," that a purely phonological analysis of the speech signal may allow infants to start acquiring the lexicon and syntax of their native language. Study presents a model of phonological bootstrapping of the lexicon and syntax that helps illustrate the congruence between problems. Article argues…

This study examines the processes underlying vocabulary acquisition, i.e., how new words are learned, in children with Williams Syndrome, a rare neurodevelopmental disorder. A Williams Syndrome group was compared to groups of normal controls in the range 3-9 years in four different experiments testing for constraints on word learning. (Author/JL)

Comments on the findings of study of maternal input into children's category knowledge in this monograph. Discusses such aspects of maternal input as the child's role in guiding the parent's language, conceptual development, ways of imparting information about category types, parental speech patterns and how they help children learn optimally, and…

Analyzes an ethnographic study of child second language (L2) learning, focusing on the disputes that two of the children engaged in. Data reveal how these language events both reflected and helped shape the identities of the children in ways that influenced their opportunities for L2 learning. (Author/VWL)

Investigates whether knowing more than one language enhances the learning of lexical items and syntactic constructions in other languages. Multilingual (M1) students outperformed unilinguals in both types of acquisition, suggesting that M1s' heightened metalinguistic skills, enhanced lexical knowledge, and a less conservative learning procedure…

Presents a framework for studying the effects of the Maturation Hypothesis on the problem of language learning, parametrically conceived, and offers a method for finding all existing maturational solutions for any parametric hypothesis space and any learning algorithm that differs from Gibson and Wexler's Triggering Learning Algorithm. (27…

Presents a controversy over the preparatory schooling of two-year-old children. The article argues that small children who attended "maternal schools" at age two years had achievements superior to those of children starting school at three years. (CK)

Focuses on a characteristic of narrative style that is associated with gender. The article shows one of the subtle ways in which language addressed to boys and girls differ. Girls' attention is turned to speech, to what they and others have said. Girls hear more diminutives; boys hear more imperatives and are often addressed in a less gentle…

Describes a connectionist model, using a simple recurrent network trained on a phoneme prediction task, that accounts for the child's ability to identify word boundaries. The model shows that aspects of linguistic structure that are not overtly marked in the input can be derived by efficiently combining multiple probabilistic cues. (Author/MSE)

Evaluated an intervention designed to influence mothers' sensitive responsiveness toward their infant by presenting information about the newborn's competence to interact and promoting affectionate handling and interaction. Found that the enhancement group showed greater frequency of co-occurrences involving vocal exchanges, looking to the…

Two experiments examined toddlers' noun vocabularies and interpretations of names for solid and non-solid items. Results indicated that one side of the solidity-syntax-category organization mapping was favored. Seventeen- to 33-month olds do not systematically generalize names for solid things by shape similarity until they already know many…

Investigated whether the content of infant speech productions is better characterized as preserving stressed and final syllables or as preserving a trochaic pattern; used a detailed longitudinal description of one child's syllable omission. Found that the trochaic template hypothesis was not supported by these early productions. (Author/JPB)