The purpose of this study was to examine changes in prelinguistic vocal production during the first 20 months of life. Vocalizations were classified into 23 mutually exclusive and exhaustive types, and grouped into five ascending levels using the Stark Assessment of Early Vocal Development-Revised (SAEVD-R). Data from 30 typically developing…

Children are able to take multiple perspectives in talking about entities and events. But the nature of children's sensitivities to the complex patterns of perspective-taking in adult language is unknown. We examine perspective-taking in four- and six-year-old Tamil-speaking children describing placement events, as reflected in the use of a…

Schaeffer (1997, 2000) argues that children lack knowledge of specificity because Dutch children omit determiners and fail to scramble pronouns. Avrutin & Brun (2001), however, find that Russian children place arguments correctly according to whether they are specific or non-specific. This paper investigates object agreement and specificity in…

This longitudinal study explored how gestures changed with with respect to speech as two children progressed from producing single words to producing two-word combinations. Two girls were followed from the production of only single words to their first production of two-word combinations. One child was followed from 14.5 to 18 months; the second…

This paper discusses empirical findings from the first language acquisition of Mandarin Chinese suggesting that certain properties of the logical form of natural language are not learned from experience. These unlearnable properties appear to manifest themselves in the child's linguistic knowledge as soon as prerequisite conditions are met.…

Computer programs for linguistic analysis of language samples from bilingual children were surveyed in order to evaluate their usefulness. Eight programs which could be implemented on the UCLA IBM 370/3033 computer were considered. It was determined that the Computer Assisted Language Analysis System was the most promising in terms of capabilities…

A fundamental concept of generative phonology stating that related morphemes have unique phonological representations is criticized. It is argued that more morphologization of phonological rules is needed to explain morphophonemic changes. (Available from North-Holland Publishing Co., P. O. Box 211, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.) (CHK)

A study to investigate the development of children's ability to relate concepts and thus understand metaphors by examining their performance on three concept-relating tasks is reported. Abstract-metaphoric, concrete-metaphoric, and literal taxonomic relationships were embedded in an analogy-like binary choice task. In this type of task, the…

The cognitive processes involved in a child's interaction with the linguistic environment are discussed. Specifically, the general cognitive processes involved in outputting long spans of connected utterances are examined. Narrative data are classified into three developmental levels: the procedural phase, where the linguistic output is generated…

Although Mandarin Chinese is a topic-prominent language, it is shown that young children acquiring Chinese as their first language access the concept of grammatical subject as well as that of topic. A total of 95 children aged 2-5 years acquiring Mandarin Chinese as their first language were tested on sentences involving equi-constructions. It was…

The transition from pre-linguistic to linguistic communication was investigated in the acquisition of pronouns in American Sign Language (ASL). Data were obtained from a congenitally deaf child learning ASL as a first language from deaf parents. Longitudinal data from the age of 6 months to 2 years and pronoun elicitation task data were analyzed.…

The progression through the developmental stages of the acquisition of interrogatives was analyzed. Data on use of the "what" interrogative were collected during play sessions from eight children at six-month intervals from the ages of 1;6 to 3 years. More than 2,400 children's interrogatives were recorded. It was demonstrated that…

The purposes of this study were to investigate (1) the level of development of four target vocal and gestural symbols (Doggie, Cup, Car, and Fiffin, a novel concept), and (2) the relationship of symbolic maturity to the use of symbols in combinations. Thirty infants (15 boys and 15 girls), between 82 and 91 weeks of age, were observed for…

Discoveries about the acquisition of American Sign Language (ASL) by deaf children are reviewed. Current research shows that ASL has developed as a fully autonomous language with complex organizational properties not derived from spoken language. Like spoken languages, ASL exhibits formal structuring at two levels and similar organizational…

The development of devices used to coin agent and instrument nouns in Hebrew was investigated among 60 children aged 3, 4, 5, 7, and 11. The prevalent word-formation device in Hebrew is the triconsonantal root combined with vowel patterns. Other available devices include suffixation, conversion, and compounding. Questions designed to elicit…