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)

Responds to 12 commentators who commented on an essay by the author about Adele Goldberg's recent book, "Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure," which develops the theory of construction grammar for a set of problems associated with verb-argument structure. (SM)

Considers aspects of talk into telephones by young children in play. Examines expression of the incorporation of recognition of another's perspective, a movement towards recontextualization of language from the primary conversational contexts of joint environment, and experiences reflected in face-to-face talk on here-and-now topics with familiar…

Examined children's ability to draw on functional information to predict the similarity of function across exemplars and to extend new words from an initial exemplar to one of two others. The cognitive difficulties associated with judgments concerning material function are discussed in relation to additional factors that could lead children under…

Analyzed article use in Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment who are learning English as a Second Language. The surface hypothesis account of specific language impairment was evaluated in relation to the use of articles in these children. Language samples were obtained from 15 Spanish-speaking children with language…

Investigated the use of "mama" or similar sounds referred to as "mama" by 75 infants less than 6 months of age. Parents were directed to listen for "mama" sounds and to note the sounds made, the age of onset, whether the sounds appeared to be directed to any person or persons, or whether they appeared to have a purpose. (Author/VWL)

Shows that Rispoli's (1999) suggestion that previous studies arguing for a contingency between the case of subject pronouns and the presence/absence of verbal agreement in the acquisition of English suffers from methodological problems is itself based on a methodology that unnecessarily biases his study against the predicted contingencies.…

Examined children's language acquisition by compiling a record of one English boy's utterances from age four to six. The record revealed the boy's interest in the meaning of words, knowledge of grammar, interest in non-English words, explorations of the connections between what people say and what they mean, and understanding of the role of…

Reviews book on the current state of psychological semantics for researchers in language development. Notes points of agreement among contributors, including: study of semantics has been too oriented toward substance nouns; assigning novel words to real objects or events is more difficult using verbs than nouns; and syntax is more integrally…

The appearance of filler syllables in the late-word period is analyzed in relation to the emergence of grammatical morphemes, by confronting data from the longitudinal study of one child acquiring French, with four hypotheses making different claims about the kind of language knowledge underlying their production. (Author/VWL)

Examines pragmatic factors that bias English-speaking children to produce more of the nouns and fewer of the verbs than they know. Data from 44 parent-child dyads in the New England directory of the CHILDES data base were analyzed. (Author/VWL)

Investigated the development of syntactic awareness in Cantonese-speaking children. Fifty-six subjects from four age groups were asked to judge the grammaticality of 40 sentences and to correct the grammatically-deviant sentences. There was a significant age effect on subject's performance in both judgment and revision tasks. (Author/VWL)