Analysis of the discourse demands across the school year within a recurred event, "Circle Time," is presented to show how three and four year olds learned to be conversationally appropriate partners within a group, how the teacher's interactional patterns shifted as students learned, and how participation in the subevents added differing…

Criteria that 9 nonnative English-speaking children in grades 2-6 used when evaluating writing are described. Results indicate that the students were critical evaluators, focused on meaning regardless of age and author, were idiosyncratic in the range of criteria used, and were influenced by the pedagogical focus of their…

Reports the findings of a study designed to investigate children's deictic changes, use of speech act verbs, and preference for reporting system in their retold narratives. Claims that a linear age function emerged and that children's mastery of direct and indirect speech extends over many years. (HB)

Analyzes the referential strategies used in narrative discourse by 10 adults and 60 Japanese children aged 3 to 7 years. Determines the factors underlying choice of nominal versus elliptical forms. Discusses results in terms of cognitive, social, and linguistic factors underlying referential choice. (HB)

Reports a case study of a British 2-year old that shows a stage in syntactic development without a subject agreement protection but with a tense phrase. A sharp contrast in use of verb forms suggests that the child had left the Optional Infinitive stage and entered a transitional stage, where the major development is that the status of the bare…

Two studies investigated developmental changes, and inter-linguistic and inter-individual variations, in the expansion and composition of young French children's early lexicons. Results indicated that lexical productivity strongly increased with age, whereas lexical diversity showed little developmental progression. Inter-individual variability in…

Twenty-two Spanish-speaking children ages 3 to 6 years participated in an elicited production study designed to test whether children's ability to produce subjunctive relative clauses related to their ability to pass a false-belief task. Results indicated a strong correlation between children's ability to use the subjunctive mood in relative…

Compared expressive vocabulary data from a systematic diary study of one child's early language development with data from longitudinal administration of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories spoken vocabulary checklist (CDI). The CDI underestimated the number of words in the diary study. Logistic curves were the best-fitting model…

Explores the acquisition process of relative clauses in Japanese and Korean. Examines the issue of whether Korean "kes" and Japanese "no" found in Korean and Japanese relative clauses are each a complementizer or a head noun.(Author/VWL)

Examines controversial interactions between children, a group generally overlooked in second-language acquisition research. Specifically, the research focuses on (1) whether children can negotiate for meaning, (2) what strategies they use, and (3) whether there are differences between the ways adults and primary school children negotiate for…

Assessed long-term predictive validity of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories: Words and Sentences (CDI:WS) for children's expressive and receptive vocabulary development. Sixty-one New Zealand children were assessed with a New Zealand version of the CDI, and with the Expressive Vocabulary Test and Peabody Picture Vocabulary…

Explores two Mandarin-speaking children's ability to refer to the past in mother-child conversation. The approach encompasses morphosyntactic, semantic, and discourse-pragmatic perspectives. Results show that the children tend to refer to immediate past spontaneously, but rely heavily on elicitation when referring to earlier past. (Author/VWL)

Investigates the cross-linguistic patterns of the overgeneralization of the intransitive/transitive alternations found in children's speech and provides new evidence from findings based on the acquisition of French. The morphosyntatic characterization of such phenomena in English and Hebrew child language is followed by a description of the…

Evaluates the claim of uniform size and shape restrictions in prosodic development using a cross-sectional database of English-speaking children's multisyllabic word productions. Suggests children's increasing faithfulness to unstressed syllables can be explained by different constraint rankings that relate to edge alignment, syllable structure,…

Explores the possibility that particular properties of how number words are used within sentences inform children of the semantic class to which they belong. Analysis of transcripts of the spontaneous speech of three children and their parents suggests that the relevant cues are available as input in parents' speech to children and that children…