Results of four experiments suggest that two-year-olds may be capable of forming inclusion relations when they hear a novel word for an object that already has a familiar name. (PCB)

Studied 16 six-month-old infants to determine whether they organized speech categories around prototypes. Infants correctly sorted novel stimuli over 90 percent of the time. Generalization to novel members of the category was significantly greater after exposure to the prototypical exemplar. (RJC)

Features of beginning stuttering in young children are reviewed. Attention is directed to studies of: frequency, type, and duration of disfluency, including number of repeated units and additional temporal aspects of instances of sound, syllable, and whole-word repetition; and associated speech and nonspeech behaviors produced by children who…

Demonstrates that underspecification of lexical-entry forms enables the restriction of phonological theory to declarative statements about the structure of lexical items and to avoid having recourse to feature-changing and deletion rules. (61 references) (VWL)

Outlines descriptive, theoretical, and methodological advances in child language research since the first volume of the "Journal of Child Language" was published. Papers in this volume build on earlier research, point the way to new research avenues, and open new lines of inquiry. (Contains 36 references.) (JP)

Reviewing the language instinct debate, this article identifies generativist views with the baby's proverbial bathwater. Suggests that instead of analyzing language into form-based units, it should be treated as an aspect of social life deriving from a capacity to contextualize experience. (Author/VWL)

Examines whether certain reconstruction effects are present in child language. Points out an unexpected restriction on forward anaphora that is argued to be a case in which Principle C of the Binding Theory (Chomsky, 1981; 1986) operates at the reconstructed level. Results suggest that the ability to judge instances of forward anaphora and of…

Investigated children's abilities to conceptualize distinctive phonological features in development, studying relationships between productive and conceptual knowledge and the influence on phonological change. Young children with phonological disorders were evaluated, given treatment for producing accurate fricatives, then retested. Results…

Reviews two guides on the Child Language Data Exchange (CHILDES) project, both of which provide tools for analyzing talk. (Author/VWL)

Investigates the role of performance limitations in children's early acquisition of verb-argument structure. Tested Valian's (1991) claims that intransitive frames are easier for children to produce early in development than transitive frames, because they do not require a direct object argument. (Author/VWL)

Investigated children's acquisition of short- and long-distance "whose"-questions to see whether children know that, in English, the entire "whose"-phrase must pied-pipe to the specifier of complementizer. Subjects were English-speaking children, ages 4-6. phrase. (Author/VWL)

Explored English-learning infants' capacities to segment bisyllabic words from fluent speech in a series of 15 experiments. Findings suggest that English learners may rely heavily on stress cues when they begin to segment words from fluent speech, but within a few months, infants learn to integrate multiple sources of information about word…

Development of specified tense and number morphology in child Catalan and Spanish was found to correlate with the onset of overt subject use in one monolingual child Spanish speaker and four monolingual child Catalan speakers who were studied longitudinally. (Author/VWL)

Examined children's tendency to make argument structure overgeneralization errors. Found that 3- to 8-year-olds were more likely to overgeneralize verbs less familiar to them, supporting the hypothesis that verb usage in particular construction types becomes entrenched over time. As children learn transitivity status of particular verbs, they…

Discusses Rispoli's data on a model of pronoun case errors in child English, arguing that his claim that overextensions of he and him are antagonistic is inaccurate and his explanation for why her subjects are more frequent than other errors is insufficient. Discusses an account in terms of relative input frequencies, suggesting the fundamental…