Examination of the relationship between linguistic forms and the functions they serve in one- to two-year-olds' (N=6) early talk about agentivity and control found that the subjects systematically employed different self reference forms to mark distinct perspectives on agency. 34 references. (Author/CB)

Assesses whether 30 children aged three-five years had a preferred direction in responding to "when"-questions and whether this preference could be influenced by story structure. Results indicated that children showed a preference for "after"-type responses and that productions of "before" were more likely to be…

Argues against Youssef's treatise which pointed out some difficulties in attempting to test Bickerton's language bioprogram hypothesis (LBH), contending that the treatise seriously misunderstood certain key concepts of the LBH and dismissed with questionable reasoning some important findings which supported the state/process distinction as a…

Edwards (1992c) concerns data and data use rather than manuals. It presents principles to facilitate reliable archive research in an imperfect world. MacWhinney and Snow (1992) endorse the principles but disagree on important details, discussed in this response. (21 references) (KM)

Provides a preliminary description of phonological tier development in Cantonese-speaking children. Data were analyzed for word, syllable, onset-rime, skeletal, and segmental tiers. Results suggest a developmental order in acquisition of hierarchical features. (Author/VWL)

Examined whether 7- to 9-year-olds vary their judgments of responsibility according to the reason that the promised action was not completed and recognize that an unfulfilled an promise is a promise regardless of whether the speaker's failure is unavoidable or intentional. (Author/VWL)

Provides evidence from child language acquisition and comparative syntax for existence of a syntactic parameter in the classical sense of Chomsky (1981), with simultaneous effects on syntactic argument structure. Implications are that syntax is subject to points of substantive parametric variation as envisioned in Chomsky, and the time course of…

This article introduces the topic of this special issue of the journal. Explains the separate worlds hypothesis, discusses feminist critiques of separate worlds, and introduces children's gender indexing and considerations of culture, context, and power. (Author/VWL)

Examined effects of animacy on production of different syntactic structures and word orders by Catalan-speaking children, and explored the relationship between age and the production of different syntactic structures by children. Results of a picture description task show that participants tended to produce more object-dislocated descriptions when…

Examined the evolution of visual perspective-taking skills in relation to comprehension and production of first, second, and third person pronouns among French and English speaking toddlers. Some perceptual perspective-taking capacities were well developed by the time children acquired a full mastery of personal pronouns. Full pronoun acquisition…

Examined the production of verbal justifications quantitatively and qualitatively in eight pairs of children whose natural discourse was videotaped, transcribed, and coded. Children produced most justifications both in the context of elaborating on a previously asserted claim and in conflicts. The statement justified and the justifications…

This article focuses on applying systematic reviews to the Early Intervention (EI) literature. Systematic reviews are defined and differentiated from traditional, or narrative, reviews and from meta-analyses. In addition, the steps involved in critiquing systematic reviews and an illustration of a systematic review from the EI literature are…

This retrospective, exploratory investigation examined the types of target words that 30 children with word-finding difficulties (aged 8 to 12 years) had difficulty naming and the types of errors they made on these words. Words were studied with reference to lexical factors that might influence naming performance: word frequency, age of…

This study describes the language and literacy skills of 11-year-olds attending a mainstream school in an area of social and economic disadvantage. The proportion of these young people experiencing difficulties in decoding and reading comprehension was identified and the relationship between spoken language skills and reading comprehension…

Purpose: Onset of canonical babbling by 10 months of age is surprisingly robust in infancy, suggesting that there must be deep biological forces that keep the development of this key vocal capability on course. This study further evaluated the robustness of canonical babbling and other aspects of prelinguistic vocal development. Method:…