A study of 71 mothers interacting with their 2- to 5-year-old children analyzed structural organization and communicative function of their speech and identified three maternal communicative styles: non-intervening; explaining; and directing. Internal consistency of the three styles appeared to be both satisfactory and related to relevant child…

Examined mothers' and preschoolers' emotion talk for age- and gender-related patterns in use of labels and explanations. Found that children used emotion words mainly in labels. Boys' emotion talk increased with age. The youngest girls had more emotion talk than same-age boys. Mothers used more explanations than labels with boys but similar…

Investigates how early a developing bilingual who is exposed simultaneously to English and Spanish can make appropriate language choices. Kept detailed records of the child's cumulative vocabulary from the first word at 10 months and on weekly audiovideo recording in both Spanish and English contexts from age 1-3. (Author/VWL)

Two experiments suggest that adults and even preschoolers possess interpretive structures--particularly object structure--that are nonclassical in the sense that they can be used to resolve an apparent contradiction. Results further suggest that certain interpretive structures present themselves in reasoning about particular predicate-object…

Basque auxiliary verbs encode tense, agreement relations with ergative, absolutive, and dative arguments, which constitute an inflectional verbal amalgam whose acquisition is not problematic for Spanish-speaking children but is for Spanish-speaking adults. This asymmetry is due to different processes by which the inflectional amalgam is acquired.…

Examined individual growth rates in definitional skill over a period of 3 to 6 years, for 68 low-income children. Results of the study support the notion that definitional skill is related to being part of an academic culture; low-income mothers, whose formal schooling is complete, generally do not give oral definitions to simple nouns as well as…

Investigated Russian children's color-term acquisition, testing one theory of color universals using acquisition order as a basicness measure and determining whether two terms for blue were genuinely basic. Testing on color-term listing, production, and comprehension indicated that color-term acquisition order agreed with the theory. The two blue…

Argues that early French relative clauses (RCs) with gaps involve movement of the relative head. The article suggests that children lack relative operators for maturational reasons. This account shows that the deviation of early RCs from adult grammar is due to this lacuna and is compensated for in a manner consistent with Universal Grammar. (39…

Examines the use of gender-distinctive language in preschool sibling conversations, focusing on mitigation in directives and related forms used during pretend play. Findings indicate that gender-distinctive patterns of language use are sensitive to variations in situation and interaction partner. (19 references) (CK)

Proposes an alternative account of the child's learning of nouns and adjectives that relies on properties of the semantic categories to be learned and of the word-learning task itself. In five experiments, a simple connectionist network was trained to label input objects in particular contexts; the network learned categories resembling nouns…

Studied the dinner table conversations of 22 families with young children. Analyzed utterances for language-focused terms. Reported that metalinguistic uses exceeded pragmatic uses. Found that during routine social interactions, parents provide children with potentially important information about the communicative functions of language.…

Describes characteristics of the Native Esperanto of eight speakers, ranging from age 6 to 14 years. Found bilingualism and nativization effects, differentiating native from non-native Esperanto speech. Among these effects are loss or modification of the accusative case, phonological reduction, attrition of tense/aspect system, and pronominal…

Examines some consequences of optimality theoretic constraint ranking and violability for the study of phonological development. The empirical base for the study is provided by previously unpublished data from a longitudinal corpus of phonetically transcribed speech from four English-learning children. (Author/JL)

Analyzed videotapes of 3- to 7-year-old Singaporean children to document play and language level. Data analysis revealed a developmental trend in play and language scores, several significant gender differences in Smilansky's and Parten/Piaget play categories but no significant gender differences in language scores. Socioeconomic status…

Presents information for parents on children's language development prior to speaking the first word, focusing on infants' readiness to learn language. Describes ways parents can support the development of language as a social and intellectual skill, including talking early and often, using songs and poetry, describing experiences, using books,…