Uncertainty was researched as a perceptual structure which mediates the transition from sensorimotor activity to language. The guiding notions are that the attentional system is geared to uncertainty from the beginning of life and that a speaker's language use is coordinated with this system as it emerges. (Author)

This experiment investigated whether three- and four-year-old children show systematic preferences for animate or inanimate nouns to function as actors and objects of simple active and passive voice sentences. The children had to choose from several toys a suitable referent for a nonsense word used in a sentence. (Author)

Transcripts of 11 young children's speech to adults were found to include hints and question directives. (FL)

Children exhibiting a referential orientation seem more likely to acquire new object names than nonreferentially oriented children. Also, children's selection of words may be influenced by the phonological structure of the words. (Author/RH)

Children (ages 5-8) were presented with a communication task under four different experimental conditions, to find contexts which would encourage their use of the indefinite article. Even older children failed to identify their referents consistently, although nearly all subjects used indefinite expressions intermittently when mentioning new…

Draws implications for the teaching and learning of writing from the language acquisition of children, based on the contention that human capacities for acquiring language do not change qualitatively as people mature. (DD)

Examined whether there was negative evidence in adult reformulations of erroneous child utterances, and if so, whether children made use of that evidence. Findings show that adults reformulate erroneous utterances often enough for learning to occur. Children can detect differences between their own utterance and the adult reformulation and make…

Eisenberg (2002) presents data from an experiment investigating 3- and 4-year-old children's comprehension of restrictive relative clauses. From the results, she argues that children do not have discourse knowledge of the felicity conditions of relative clauses before acquiring the syntax of relativization. This article evaluates this conclusion…

Presents a hybrid ACT-R model that shows U-shaped learning of the English past tense without direct feedback, changes in vocabulary, or unrealistically high rates of regular verbs. Illustrates that the model can learn the default rule, even if regular forms are infrequent. Shows that the model can explore the question of why there is a distinction…

Reanalyzes what the literature has taken to be children's productions of Gen subjects and argues that Gen subjects do not exist in child English. Suggests that what look like Gen subjects appear only in specific discourse contexts: contexts of contrastive focus or contexts of emphatic focus. (Author/VWL)

Examined young children's acquisition of wh-questions. Children heard a wh-question and attempted to repeat it; a "talking bear" answered. The same format was used for two intervention sessions for children in a quasicontrol condition. Suggests very little input--if concentrated and varied and presented so the child attends to it and…

Sixteen children, aged 7:8 to 9:10, learned 2 miniature languages differing in word order. Children found the Subject-Object-Verb language easier than the Verb-Subject-Object language; they also made more suffix errors and fewer word order errors in the Subject-Object-Verb language. (Author/DB)

Describes the CHILDES/BIB electronic bibliographic database, its contents, and its relationship to the CHILDES database. CHILDES is a depository of child language corpora and is the publisher of CHAT (a transcription manual) and CLAN (an electronic package for child language research). (GLR)

Study of how the verbal component of "babytalk" affected three-month-olds' (N=40) vocal qualities suggested that conversational turn-taking facilitated a speak-listen pattern of infant vocalizations and indicated that what adults "say" to infants influences what infants "say" in response. (Author/CB)

Investigation into the relative effectiveness of four input strategies for two-year-olds' (N=56) category evolution found that the most effective strategy involved labelling an object and providing both a physical demonstration and a verbal description of important attributes. (Author/CB)