Examined the distribution of two Hebrew nominal structures in spoken and written texts of two genres produced by 90 native-speaking participants. Written texts were found to be denser than spoken texts lexically and syntactically as measured by a number of novel N-N compounds and denominal adjectives per clause; in older age groups this difference…

Reviews the existing record pertaining to the acquisition of negation in Korean and juxtaposing it with current research in cross-linguistic child language acquisition. (Author/VWL)

Investigates whether the aspect-before-tense hypothesis accounts for the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology in child second language English. Addressed whether early uses of tense-aspect inflections can be analyzed as a spell-out of semantic/aspectual features of verbs. Data are from a longitudinal study of an 8-year-old Russian-speaking child…

Responds to Bowey's comments on an earlier article--"Rhyme, Language, and Children's Reading." Here, the statistical model used in the earlier analysis is clarified, and it is asserted that the new analysis presented by Bowey supports the hypothesis that children's sensitivity to rhyme/alliteration and reading is independent of general…

Exploration of the usefulness of a visual preference technique for assessing word comprehension in infants demonstrated increases in comprehension from 8 to 14 and 14 to 20 months; established longitudinal stability of comprehension from 14 to 20 months; and showed a profound effect of stimulus salience and the lack of sex differences in word…

Discourse skills and utterance lengths of mothers and their toddlers were examined among four language-delayed and four normal children. Language-delayed child-mother dyads were often interrupted by the need to clarify and the lack of definitive control in the conversational turn-taking structure. Results indicated less shared context in…

Examined how Italian day-care teachers (N=5) spoke to young children and adjusted their language according to age and size of groups. It was found that teachers made both structural and functional modifications of language according to childrens' ages and the size of groups, with group size exerting a greater influence on the features of the…

Replication of a study that showed that deaf 15- to 18-year- olds could accurately identify a significant number of isolated signs presented well out in peripheral vision found that 8- to 12-year-olds could also identify such signs, although results showed a significant effect of age on performance. (Author/CB)

Analysis of longitudinal data on the phonetic development of Swedish infants (N=4) from 1 through 17 months of age showed five distinct stages in early vocalization development: glottal; velar/uvular; vocalic; reduplicated consonant babbling; and variegated consonant babbling. Comparison with infants of differing linguistic backgrounds indicated…

Investigated how prosodic cues in motherese assisted infants' language acquisition. Infants oriented longer to speech interrupted at clausal boundaries than to matched speech interrupted at within-clause locations. The prosodic qualities of motherese provided infants with cues to units of speech that corresponded to grammatical units of language.…

Re-examines research literature supporting the idea that infants and young children simultaneously learning two languages mix elements from the two languages. It is argued that, contrary to most extant interpretations, bilingual children develop differentiated language systems from the beginning and are able to use their developing languages in…

Vowel production of a 14-month-old girl was studied over a 6-month period. Sixty percent of the vowels were produced correctly. A complex pattern of vowel preferences and errors was partially related to prespeech babbling preferences and strongly related to word structure variables (monosyllabic versus disyllabic). (Author/JDD)

Proposes that the optional subject phenomenon in early child language arises because children have not yet acquired the morphological elements (primarily modal and tense) necessary to distinguish subject-taking verbs (e.g., finite verbs) from their non-subject-taking counterparts (e.g., infinitives). (Author/CB)

Analyzes preschool class circle time from an ethnographic perspective. Findings suggest that rules, guidelines, expectations, and roles in the event change over time. (RJC)

Explores three explanations for the lack of a relationship between oral language development and reading ability. Presents data which provides evidence for each of the following sources of explanation: (1) inappropriateness of measures used in previous studies, (2) differences between written and spoken languages, and (3) the distinction between…