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…

Collected naturalistic data from six children age 8-9 talking with their relatives and friends. Focuses on directives and requests used by the children and their interlocutors in informal conversations. (Author/VWL)

Two studies investigated linguistic representations underlying English-speaking 2.5-year-olds' production of transitive utterances. Findings indicated that children trained with pronouns and nouns could produce a transitive utterance creatively with a novel verb. Results suggest that English-speaking children build many of their early linguistic…

This article reviews the literature in the area of language brokering. Language brokers are children of immigrant families who translate and interpret for their parents and other individuals. Results suggest that language brokers possess unique characteristics that make them suitable for their role as the family's translator and interpreter.…

The paper examines the first twenty verb-forms recorded for six Hebrew-speaking children aged between 1;2 and 2;1, and how they evolve into fully inflected verbs for three of these children. Discussion focuses first on what word-forms children initially select for the verbs they produce, what role these forms play in children's emergent grammar,…

The acquisition of noun gender on articles was studied in a sample of 21 young German-speaking children. Longitudinal spontaneous speech data were used. Data analysis is based on 22 two-hourly speech samples per child from 6 children between 1 ; 4 and 3 ; 8 and on 5 two-hourly speech samples per child from 15 children between 1 ; 4 and 2 ; 10. The…

This paper focuses on the aspects of the lexicon in 66 prematurely born very-low-birth-weight and 87 full-term Finnish children at 2;0, studied using the Finnish version of the "MacArthur Communicative Developmental Inventory". The groups did not differ in vocabulary size. Furthermore, the female advantage in vocabulary size was not seen…

The Structured Observation System (SOS) is a data collection method developed to document changes in the communication behaviours of children identified with speech and language delays. The system employs a rating scale which reflects the occurrence of communication behaviours as well as the amount of assistance needed for behaviours to occur.…

This study investigates the relationship between theory of mind (ToM) skills in deaf children and input from their hearing mothers. Twenty-two hearing mothers and their deaf children (ages 4-10 years) participated in tasks designed to elicit talk about the mind. The mothers' mental state talk was compared with that of 26 mothers with hearing…