The purpose of the present study was to determine whether the VERBAL component of babytalk affected the vocal quality of infants. Two groups of 20 0;3 infants experienced either conversational turn taking or random responsiveness of an adult. Adult responsiveness consisted of a smile, light touch to the abdomen, and a NONVERBAL ‘tsk, tsk, tsk’ sound (instead of speech). All infant vocalizations were counted and then coded as ‘syllabic’ or ‘vocalic’ sounds. The results of the study demonstrated that TURN TAKING facilitated a speak-listen pattern of vocalizing by the infant, but in the absence of the VERBAL component of the adult's response, turn taking had no special facilitative effect on syllabic sounds. It was concluded that what adults say to 3-month-old infants influences what infants ‘say’ in return. Possible mechanisms underlying the infant's vocal response to verbal input were reviewed. It was suggested that the more mature sounds (syllabic) may proportionally increase as a result of the combined effects of turn-taking and verbal stimulation on the motor control of respiration and phonation.

Previous studies have suggested that paternal vocabulary selection in speech to young children may be more diverse or demanding than that of mothers. This study examined the speech of eight mothers and eight fathers to their young language learning children. Nominal usage was subjected to TTR and frequency-of-occurrence analyses. In general, while paternal speech does not appear to be more diverse than maternal speech, it does appear to be characterized by greater usage of rare vocabulary and significantly lower usage of common vocabulary than is maternal speech.

Young children's initial categories often are not identical to the adult category labelled by the same word. Eventually, children's categories must evolve to correspond to the adult standard. The purpose of this study was to consider the relative effectiveness of four input strategies in inducing the child to learn the adult-appropriate label and begin to form a new category. Fifty-six children aged 2;0 were taught new labels for objects that they included in categories labelled by different names. Comprehension and production post-tests were then administered. As expected, the most effective strategy involved labelling an object and providing both a physical demonstration and a verbal description of important attributes that made the object a member of the adult-appropriate category. The label plus physical demonstration strategy was next most effective. Neither the label plus verbal description strategy nor the label only strategy was effective for children of this age. Results also indicated that these 24 month olds did not yet honour the convention of mutual exclusivity of basic level categories.

The current study assessed the child's learning of an object label in two conditions: when its referent was highly similar and when its referent was highly dissimilar to the referent of a known child word. Twenty-two 2-year-old children were taught the name for an object. In a session several days subsequent, they were taught names for two new objects: one which was highly similar and one which was highly dissimilar to the referent of the word learned in the first session (two stimulus sets assured counterbalancing). In this second session, children produced the word with the similar referent more often than the word with the dissimilar referent. In third and fourth sessions (several days later), children continued to show better performance with the similar word in comprehension. These results were interpreted as evidence that young children find it easier to learn a new word when they are able to contrast its referent with that of a word they already know.

Negative utterances were collected longitudinally from two English-, five French- and four Korean-speaking children between 1;7 and 3;4. An analysis focusing on both non-verbal context and linguistic form led to the distinction of nine semantic/pragmatic categories which could capture cognitive and linguistic development in some detail: non-existence, prohibition, rejection, failure, denial, inability, epis-temic negation, normative and inferential negation. The nine categories were found in all three languages and their developmental order was similar across the languages. Different patterns were shown concerning the form-function relationship for different categories; for some categories, the distinct form emerged gradually after the function was acquired, while for others, the distinct form emerged simultaneously with the new function. Thus new forms emerged to subdivide an old category or to express a new function. This pattern was most typical for categories developed at later periods. It is suggested that whereas cognitive development precedes language development at an early period, at later periods cognitive and language development interact with each other.

The development of the forms and functions of interrogatives in parent-child interaction in the early stages of language acquisition is discussed with illustrative examples from data relating to two Tamil-speaking children and their parents. The analysis of the data reveals that children first acquire and use intonation questions followed by enga ‘where’, enna ‘what’ and yaari ‘who’. Yes/no questions using the interrogative marker -aa are acquired in the next stage when the children are able to use verb endings. Similarly question words that take case markers are acquired in the next stage. It is emphasized that interrogatives serve a multiplicity of communicative functions and are not restricted to the information-seeking role. Children, when they begin to use interrogatives, model their usage of them on the adult behaviour patterns to which they have been exposed, both in terms of form and function.

This study examined whether pragmatic ordering factors account for the apparent preference for ANIMATE-INANIMATE (AI) order in passive and active sentences. If so, learning noun order relations in NNV sequences with an INANIMATE PATIENT + ANIMATE AGENT (It's the drum the boy plays) should be more difficult than with an ANIMATE PATIENT + ANIMATE AGENT (It's the girl the boy chases). Seventy children aged 3;0 to 5;3 were trained with either AAV or IAV exemplars, and then tested for their noun order in NNV utterances when describing animate agent + animate patient and animate agent + inanimate patient pictures. As judged by post-training performance, AAV and AIV training had comparable effects at age three, but IAV resulted in better learning at ages four and five. It was argued that the latter benefited from the correlation between animacy and subject in English sentences.

This study focuses on children who go through a ‘silent’ period early in the course of second language development, during which they largely cease verbal communication with speakers of the second language (English). Video recordings with radio microphones under natural conditions revealed that most of these children engaged in extensive private speech, which they were found to use for a variety of intrapersonal learning strategies, including (1) repetition of others' utterances, (2) recall and practice, (3) creation of new linguistic forms, (4) paradigmatic substitution and syntagmatic expansion, and (5) rehearsal for overt social performance. Quantity and quality of private speech was related not only to the children's level of cognitive development and the difficulty of the learning task (confirming previous research), but also to the children's social orientation and learning style, and to the domain of knowledge (language) that was being acquired.

Language has two mechanisms for creating new names from old words; combining morphemes and changing word meaning. Word compounds are clear cases of ‘combining’, metaphors of ‘changing’. A categorial framework for relating compounds and metaphors is presented and used in discussing aspects of their development. compelled and preferred compounds and metaphors are distinguished. Preferred compounds tend to serve the function of being conceptually precise, whereas preferred metaphors tend to serve ‘suggestive’ functions. Metaphoric compounds, which may integrate both functions, seem to be characteristic of middle childhood. Metaphors then may also acquire a language-learning function. It is suggested that the so-called literal stage, does not exist, but that the forms and functions of metaphor change in the course of development.

Three studies were carried out in order to account for development of word definitions. Study i was aimed at analysing the role of class inclusion skills and age (5– and 7–year-olds and adults) in production of definitions containing superordinate categorical terms. No differences were found between 7-year-olds who had passed a class inclusion task and those who had not passed it as regards number of definitions containing superordinates, while differences were found between younger and older children and between children and adults. Study 2 was aimed at obtaining some normative criteria on the ‘goodness’ of definitions provided in Study 1, by using adult judges. It was found that the best definitions are those which contain both categorical terms and specific information about the to-be-defined object. It was also found that adults may adjust their standard definitional criteria to the kind of interlocutor (i.e. a child or a Martian). Study 3 confirms that younger children's definitions fall far short of the adult informativeness and completeness criteria while, by the age of ten, such criteria are met. Overall results were interpreted as conforming to a progressive conventionalization of children's strategies for defining objects.

This cross-linguistic study investigates the relative importance of validity in terms of the strengths of syntactic cues and cue processing cost in sentence comprehension by French and Spanish children (4; 6–6; 6). The notion of cue cost refers to the distinction between local and topological processing types. Choices of the agent (cue strength) and latencies (cue cost) were collected through the acting out of sentences containing different syntactic cues. These cues (word order, clitic pronoun, verbal agreement plus accusative preposition a in Spanish) are ordered on a continuum from the most topological (word order) to the most local (preposition a). The analysis of cue strengths reveals that, while for French children a linguistic cue is all the stronger the more topological it is (verbal agreement < clitic pronoun < word order), for Spanish children a cue is all the stronger the more local it is (word order < clitic pronoun < verbal agreement < preposition a). The fact that Spanish children's latencies are always shorter (2150 msec) than those of French children (3110 msec) must be related to the effect of the preposition a which permits efficient role assignments with minimal cost. These results stress the importance of locality in sentence processing. On the other hand, a comparison with our similar adult cross-linguistic data demonstrates that the impact of cue cost changes over time.

Goad & Ingram (1987) use the mere existence of inter-child variability to argue in favour of a ‘cognitive’, and against a ‘biological’ model of phonological development (Locke 1983). In this response it is suggested that such an argument fails to recognize the uniqueness of each individual's neural and vocal structures, ignores documented variability in the phonetic patterns of prelexical (and arguably prephonological) infants, and assumes–inexplicably–that inter-child variability implies the operation of ‘cognitive’ factors.