A discussion focusing on the concept of metalinguistic awareness, particularly in bilingual children, precedes a discussion of metalinguistic awareness and its potential relationship with the cognitive advantages of bilingualism. The metalinguistic history and metalinguistic awareness of a subject, bilingual in German and English, are highlighted.…

Three- to nine-year-olds' (N=80) post-exposure production of regular and irregular suffixes indicated that subjects found it easier to learn a regular suffix when they heard it used with phonetically similar base forms. Subjects were more likely to overgeneralize the regular suffix to irregular forms when they had heard it used in conjunction with…

This study of early word learning focused on the status of object words in early vocabularies. Fourteen children were followed from nine months to two years of age, and monthly vocabulary growth was analyzed. Results indicated that object words represented approximately one-third, on average, of the different words the children learned. (TJQ)

Three experiments examined the ability of 60 3-year-old children's ability to select homonym pairs and the extent to which they realized that homonyms represent 2 different categories. Results confirm that children have the metalinguistic skills necessary to identify homonym pairs and to realize they represent two different categories, suggesting…

The focus of this paper is the acquisition of the verb "eat." The transcripts of 40 children who were audiotaped monthly from 1;0 to 3;0, showed that "eat" was the first member of this verb class to be acquired. (16 references) (JL)

Analyzed conversational narratives spontaneously produced by preschool children. Results indicated that children use three forms of narrative, usually mark new topics with an introductory phrase, and prefer to talk about themselves as engaged in positive events. Notes that children are most likely to address their narratives to adults. (HTH)

Six lexical principles for object label learning are evaluated. In this framework, lexical acquisition changes as a result of the particular principles a given child has at his or her disposal. These principles were developed for the class of object labels but may also apply across other early-appearing word classes. (Contains 98 references.) (JP)

A set of predictions based on Reinhart's (1986) Theory of Relevance are evaluated against published results of tests of Binding Theory. Relevance Theory provides a means of understanding constraints on testing syntactic knowledge. Pragmatic factors must be systematically controlled in any evaluation of syntactic knowledge. (Contains 22…

A case study on bilingual child language development used the systemic functional (SF) model to analyze data. Other studies have used the generative transformational or pragmatic models. The SF framework recognizes language as a tristratal system composed of semantics, lexicogrammar, and phonology. (49 references) (LET)

This study of 3 boys (ages 5-6) with autism found that adult high-constraint antecedent utterances elicited more verbal utterances in general, including subjects' echolalia; adult low-constraint utterances elicited more subject high-constraint utterances; and the degree of adult-utterance constraint did not influence the mean lengths of subjects'…

Aims to give a thorough analysis of the morphosyntax produced at the outset of multi-word speech, with a classification of free language produced at 2 years by 27 French-speaking children. A classification performed with word sequences reveals surprisingly adult-like sequences of syntactic categories of words. (Author/VWL)

Examines why children have difficulty with homonymy. Two experiments were conducted. Children, ages 3 and 4 years, had to select or judge another person's selection of a different object with the same name, avoiding identical objects and misnomers. Older children were successful, but younger children failed these tasks. (Author/VWL)

Introduces this special issue of the journal and reports on new directions in the research that began with code switching, but increasingly has come to include other types of language contact phenomena. The articles in the issue report on analyses and explanations for a variety of outcomes in bilingual production. (Author/VWL)

Describes the cornerstone of traditional descriptive grammars as the construction (a recurrent patterns of linguistic elements that serves a communicative function), examining argument structure constructions, verbs and constructions, and implications for studying language development. Discusses Adele Goldberg's recent book, which develops the…

Presents the responses of 12 authors to Michael Tomasello's essay, which comments on Adele Goldberg's recent book, "Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure." Goldberg's book develops the theory of construction grammar for a set of problems associated with verb-argument structure. (SM)