A case is reported of failure to supply negation in tag questions for a period of nearly two years. It is argued that such cases, which have been explained in terms of limited processing capacity, are equally compatible with an explanation in terms of context-specific knowledge. (Author)

Analysis of a database of tag questions in children's speech shed light on their structure and function. (JB)

Applies two fundamental principles of optimalist theory to yield predictions about cluster reduction patterns. (Author/VWL)

Gender agreement elicitation was used with Russian children to examine how diminutives common in Russian child-directed speech affect gender learning. Children were shown pictures of familiar and novel animals and asked to describe them after hearing their names, which contained regular morphophonological cues to masculine or feminine gender.…

Reanalyzes production data from three French children to make two basic points. Shows that tense and agreement inflection follow independent courses of acquisition (in child French). Using a mechanism of grammatical development based on partial rankings of constraints, analysis successfully models over three stages the frequency with which…

Shares childhood experiences of singing while staying with older relatives. Recounts the feelings of a small child dealing with the death of a favorite aunt. (MG)

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…