Examines mealtimes of preschoolers' families to determine whether rare words are used in informative ways so that a child could learn their meanings. Each use was coded for whether it was informative or uninformative; each informative exchange was coded for type of strategy used to provide support. Frequency of use was positively correlated with…

Investigates whether inflectional morphology is rule-based or whether the assumption of pattern association is more adequate to account for the facts, arguing for the latter based on analysis of acquisitional data. Review of earlier literature on the subject examines experiments with German- and English-speaking children and supports the schema…

Investigated the hierarchical organization of the semantic system in preschoolers with and without word-finding deficits. Children named a series of objects at multiple levels of the noun hierarchy in response to contrast questions. Children with word-finding deficits had similar abilities to the other children but did not have enough stored…

Investigated the interface of form and function in the acquisition of negation in Cantonese-speaking children. Data--from the Hong Kong Cantonese Child Language Corpus--were longitudinal spontaneous samples of eight children aged 1.5 to 3.8 years. Main issues in the study were the sequence of emergence of negative markers and the acquisition of 11…

Developed taxonomy of eight types of negation found in children's narratives, and examined children's personal narratives and narratives elicited by picture books. Found most frequent negation to be reference to actions that did not happen. Younger children used negation more than older children, and negation occurred more frequently in personal…

Reports the findings of a cross-sectional study that investigated the acquisition of relative clauses by 27 Tamil-speaking children who ranged in age from 2 years and 11 months to 6 years and 6 months. A picture-cued production task was used to elicit relative clauses from the child subjects. (Author/VWL)

Finds Bloom and Tinker's description and measurement of active, integrated, and situated children to be a credible scientifically rigorous paradigm for language acquisition research. Highlights their use of the naturalistic, observational method to understand the changing patterns of integration and use of multifaceted abilities in child language…

Tested 59 three-year olds three times over seven months to assess the contribution of development of theory of mind and language to one another. Found that earlier language abilities predicted later theory-of-mind test performance (controlling for earlier theory of mind), but earlier theory-of-mind did not predict later language-test performance…

Analyzed correct wh-question production and subject-auxiliary inversion errors in one child's wh-question data. Argues that two current movement rule accounts cannot explain patterning of early wh-questions. Data can be explained by the child's knowledge of particular lexically-specific wh-word+auxiliary combinations, and inversion and universion…

A meta-analysis was carried out of interventions for children with primary developmental speech and language delays/disorders. The data were categorized depending on the control group used in the study (no treatment, general stimulation, or routine speech and language therapy) and were considered in terms of the effects of intervention on…

Complex complements are clausal objects containing tensed verbs (e.g., that she cried) or infinitives (e.g., to cry), following main verbs of communication or mental activities (e.g., say, want). This research examined whether English- and Cantonese-speaking 4-year-olds' complement understanding uniquely predicts their representation of other…

Many parents question what is normal and what their kids should be doing at different ages. More and more, parents are turning to their local libraries for advice. Besides being empathetic supporters and referring parents to the rich resources within our libraries that detail language-development milestones for young children, librarians need to…

Objective: To investigate parents' experiences of surveillance for early talking difficulties. Design: Qualitative study nested within a randomised controlled trial. Setting: Interviews with the parents of 20 children identified as having early difficulties. Results: Most parents were in favour of surveillance of children's language. Parents do…

Navajo and Quechua, both languages with a highly complex morphology, provide intriguing insights into the acquisition of inflectional systems. The development of the verb in the two languages is especially interesting, since the morphology encodes diverse grammatical notions, with the complex verb often constituting the entire sentence. While the…

As Peters (2001) has suggested, the young child's use of fillers seems to indicate awareness of distributionally-defined slots in which some as yet unidentified material belongs. One may view a filler as an emergent transitional form; as a slot that serves as an underspecified lexical entry for the accumulation of phonological and functional…