Argues that Bartsch and Wellman are successful in analyzing natural language to understand the emergence and development of a theory of mind in everyday social interaction. Discusses their delineation of the transition from a focus on desire to a concept of belief, and describes their views on contextual and cultural variables in theory of mind…

Presents the goals of the Plunkett and Marchman (PM) connectionist model of the acquisition of verb morphology, and responds to related criticisms. Claims that small vocabulary size allows young children to correctly produce both regular and irregular past tense forms, and that non-linearities in vocabulary growth are a contributing factor to the…

Focuses on nativist theories of language learning and how they apply to second-language acquisition (SLA). The article is seeking a nativism that goes beyond the scope of Universal Grammar and explains the human cognitive capacity for language learning, the learning of all language structures found in natural languages, and SLA. (95 references)…

Argues against the linguistic account of children's responses to sentences with universal quantification and reports on investigations of their comprehension and production of quantificational sentences. The article concludes that young children have full grammatical competence with universal quantification. (58 references) (Author/CK)

Observed child-parent interaction to investigate the early temporal and aspectual morphology in four monolingual Russian speaking children. Analysis of data obtained in weekly videotaped sessions shows early mastery of all tenses as well as grammatical aspect at an early age. (Author/VWL)

Examines the communicative use of gestural and vocal modalities by normally developing Italian children during the transition from one- to two-word speech. Results indicate that gesture and gesture-word combinations during this transition is a robust feature of communicative development in a rich gestural culture. (37 references) (Author/CK)

Explores how children negotiated social identities through language used in spontaneous, casual conversation. Examines how audio transcripts of the childrens' conversations exhibit different aspects of their social "selves" and suggests that their talk can be analyzed in relation to the individual self, the immediately situated social actor, and…

Explores (from the point of view of the writer, a children's author) one aspect of learning about language that is present in the picture books he writes: the relation between sound and sense. (SR)

Examined Venezuelan children's developing abilities to use evaluative language in fictional and personal narratives. Looks at whether the use of evaluative language varies in fictional and personal narratives, there is a relationship between the use of evaluative language in these two narrative genres, and and the role children's age and…

Three experiments introduced 2- and 3-year-olds to novel adjectives either using full noun phrases and describing multiple familiar objects sharing a salient property or describing nouns of vague reference. Found that both groups mapped novel adjectives onto object properties when given taxonomically specific nouns with rich referential and…

Argues that the results detailed in Bryant, MacLean, and Bradley's 1990 article do not differ greatly with those reported earlier by Bowey and Patel, and suggests that discrepancies between the two statistical analyses reflect the relative size of simple correlations and are attributable to differences in the designs of the two studies. (30…

When assessed for speech/language development, 31 children (age 1-12) fitted with endotracheal tubes for more than 3 months beginning by age 13 months showed overall language functioning within normal limits and commensurate with cognitive ability. However, a pattern of expressive language disability was noted in the oldest group. (Author/JDD)

Looks at the dreams, anxieties, confusions, satisfactions, and aspirations of the many worlds of childhood and at the professional materials that can help teachers to reach those worlds. Reviews six resources for professional materials and four resources for instructional materials. (MG)

Reports a study of two- and three-year-olds' acquisition of complex sentences with perception and epistemic verbs that took a second verb in their complements. Complement types, complementizer connectives, and the discourse contexts in which complementation occurred were specific to individual matrix verbs. (Author/CB)

Analysis of mothers' pragmatic language use and children's language levels during free play sessions suggested that a mother-driven, direct influence model may be inappropriate for many mother speech-child language development relationships and points to the feasibility of child- and mother-driven explanatory models for indirect relationships.…