Presents a study of the spontaneous pre-sentential negations of preschool English-speaking children that supports the hypothesis that child English nonanaphoric pre-sentential negation is a form of metalinguistic exclamatory sentence negation. A detailed discourse analysis reveals these child negations as echoic and expressive of objection and…

Examines issues relating to similarity neighborhoods of words in children's lexicons. Young children's receptive vocabularies were analyzed for three-phoneme, four-phoneme and five-phoneme words. The pattern of the original results from Charles-Luce & Luce (1990) was replicated. (18 references) (Author/CK)

Examines the assumptions behind three attempts to introduce formulaic language into second language teaching. Contextualizes the discussion by briefly outlining the nature of formulaic language as a phenomenon. (Author/VWL)

Demonstrates that an understanding of children's language-acquisition difficulties with a wide range of syntactic constructions should be derived from limitations on the child's ability to deal with processing load and formal representational complexity. Maintains this can be done only in the context of a view of syntactic representation…

Examines naturalistic adult-to-child speech of Italian middle class mothers to determine which patterns characterize linguistic input to infants. Because Italian is a pro-drop language, adult-to-child speech revealed bias toward more salient semantic and morphological significance of verbs relative to nouns, and verbs will likely occupy…

Describes the phonological acquisition of 129 monolingual Putonghua-speaking children, aged 1.6 to 4.6 years. Children's errors suggested that Putonghua-speaking children master four elements of Putonghua syllables in this order: (1) tones; (2) syllable-initial consonants; (3) vowels; and (4) syllable-final consonants. Suggests that the saliency…

Investigates structural and pragmatic aspects of caregiver input in English and Korean that relate to the early development of nouns and verbs. Twenty mothers in each language were asked to interact with their children in two contexts: Book-reading and toy-play. Data suggest that systematic comparisons of caregiver input within and across…

Examined role of isolated words in early vocabulary development. Found that isolated words are a reliable feature of speech to infants; that they include a variety of word types; and that a substantial fraction of words infants produce are words that mothers speak in isolation. Frequency of hearing words in isolation better predicts learning than…

This paper advances the hypothesis that young children use narrative play and stories to construct two types of fiction, the worlds of "what is" and "what if." Heinz Werner's conceptualization of children's spheres of reality, in which actions, symbols, and events are constructed in particular ways, is used as a theoretical framework for…

The durational characteristics of novel words produced in repeated trials were evaluated in separate groups of children with, and without speech delay (SD). Children produced disyllabic novel words containing either a trochaic or iambic stress pattern. Results of acoustic analysis indicated a significant interaction between trial number and…

Development of children's vocabularies for gender-typed words and communicative actions was investigated longitudinally from 13 to 36 months and in a group of 9.5-month-olds. Vocabularies of gendered words were assessed using lists of adult-rated gender-typed words from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI; L. Fenson et…

This study was designed to provide a general picture of infant vocal-motor coordination and test predictions generated by Iverson and Thelen's (1999) model of the development of the gesture-speech system. Forty-seven 6- to 9-month-old infants were videotaped with a primary caregiver during rattle and toy play. Results indicated an age-related…

The purpose of study was to investigate the impact of pre-surgical Infant Orthopaedics (IO) on consonant production at 18 months of age in children with Unilateral Cleft Lip and Palate (UCLP) and to compare the consonant production to that of age-matched children without clefts. The first ten children in a consecutive series of 20 with UCLP…

This article suggests a possible link between incipient stuttering and early difficulty in language formulation. The hypothesis offers a unifying explanation of an array of empirical observations. Among these observations are the following: early stuttering occurs only on the first word of a syntactic structure; stuttering does not appear to be…

The poverty of stimulus argument is one of the most controversial arguments in the study of language acquisition. Here we follow previous approaches challenging the assumption of impoverished primary linguistic data, focusing on the specific problem of auxiliary (AUX) fronting in complex polar interrogatives. We develop a series of corpus analyses…