The role of agent priority in event perception in word acquisition was investigated using 24 infants at the one-word stage of language production. Nonsense words were presented in narrations referring to agent, recipient or stationary nonsense puppet-actors in filmed events. The nonsense stimuli along with a sense word referring to a sense puppet were presented in a habituation series. Word acquisition was measured by the extent of response recovery to an incorrect pairing of a nonsense word with a sense referent, and by the number of infants accurately choosing named puppets. Both measures were significantly greater for puppets in agent roles than for other puppets. A speech modification condition (exaggerated intonation with repetition) held attention longer but did not facilitate acquisition.

The effect of an adult–child discourse structure on children's production of word combinations was examined. Seventeen children at the singleword utterance level (1; 5–2; 1) served as subjects. An experimental group of six children were engaged in vertical structures over 10 sessions, while the remaining children served as a control group. Pre-tests and post-tests revealed a significant difference in the number of spontaneous and elicited multiword productions for the experimental group, but no difference for the control group.

The relationship between affix processing and linguistic systems was evaluated through an analysis of prefixation and suffixation in the tense-aspect and locative systems of child Polish. For six children ranging in age from 1; 7 to 2; 6, the distinction between imperfective and perfective aspect was made more frequently by prefixation than by suffixation. Prefixation was found to be just as productive in the specification of locative distinctions as aspectual distinctions. We found no bias in affix processing which might have favoured suffixation, and no interaction of linguistic systems with affix processing. Furthermore, an inter-language comparison confirmed these intralanguage findings. Finally, we argued that affix processing involves a parallel analysis of patterns of stored information providing the motivation for selective attention.

Macken & Barton (1980) noted an asymmetry in their young Spanish-learning children's word-initial stop productions, as compared with English-learning children's, namely, ‘the Spanish-learning children acquire “lead” voicing…after age four’, whereas ‘English-learning children acquire “long lag” stops…by about 2;6’. ‘One possible explanation’, they propose, ‘is that lead voicing is inherently difficult to produce or at least more difficult to learn than long lag…’. The purpose of this Note is to present data suggesting that young children learning French, which also employs phonetically pre-voiced stops for its phonemically voiced category, also show an asymmetry in their word-initial stop productions. Furthermore, this asymmetry supports the notion, proposed by Macken & Barton, that lead voicing is somehow ‘more difficult’ for these young children to learn to produce. However, the actual ‘strategy’ used by the French-learning children to circumvent this presumed difficulty is different from that used by Macken & Barton's Spanish-learning children. This difference supports the notion that children have a certain degree of latitude in finding their way through the maze of psycholinguistic development (Kiparsky & Menn 1977).

A token-placement technique was used to investigate the influence of actor and patient animacy in determining which sentences 48 2-year-olds viewed as prototypical. After training on one of three sentence types that varied in the animacy/inanimacy of actors and patients, all children were tested for generalization on pictures with different animacy/inanimacy patterns. While most children placed actor tokens on generalization sentences correctly, regardless of animacy, half responded randomly in patient token placement. Type of training only affected children who, overall, were random responders. The results suggest that the actor category is usually acquired first for prototypical sentences with animate actors and inanimate patients.

Children's production of case-marked pronouns in Hebrew was studied with respect to possessive marking, direct-object marking, and ‘on’- locative marking. In each of these three instances the preposition appears in a bound form with a suffixal pronominal. One hundred and five children between 2;0 and 5:5 were tested in a game-like procedure designed to elicit each of the three prepositions with 1st, 2nd and 3rd personal pronouns. Results indicate that general cross-linguistic principles are operating in the acquisition process, while language specific morphophonological complexity affects relative order of acquisition. A developmental sequence may be seen in the five response patterns identified.

In a between-subjects design, 105 children aged 2; 5–5; 5 enacted their interpretation of passive and inverted cleft (IC) sentences in which animacy was systematically varied. Two agent strategies were found at 3;0: dynamic agent and word order. For ICs, the word order strategy persisted at 4;0, but the dynamic agent approach was replaced by an animate agent strategy. For passives, 4-year-olds mostly used structural relations, either regardless of agent and patient animacy (50 % of children), or only for animate patients (30% of children). The latter finding is discussed in terms of topicalization priorities.

This study investigates the development of prepositions used in the expression of circumstances as adverbial adjuncts in the speech of three Spanish-speaking middle-class children. The study begins with the first appearance of one of these prepositions and the children are followed until age 4. In spite of the differences among the children concerning other aspects of their language development, what predominates in the present case is similarity. Both the forms and the meanings expressed turned up in much the same sequence in the speech of the three children. Yet when both form and meaning were seen together the results showed great variability; that is, each child began expressing a given circumstance by means of a different preposition. On the other hand, the circumstance most commonly expressed by means of new prepositions was place. The amount of polysemy increased with age, usually starting with a single meaning for each preposition. Expressions were found which seemed to represent intermediate stages between an early general category (co-occurrence) and the more specific semantic categories of space, instrument and company.

Forty monolingual Spanish-speaking Peruvian children ages 3; 6–5; 5 were given a search task to test comprehension of six locative phrases depicting the four spatial relations in front of, in back of, beside and under. Performance improved with age and was best for under (debajo de) and poorest on beside (al costado de, al lado de). There was no evidence that locatives lacking object part terms (delante de for in front of and al costado de for beside) resulted in poorer performance than locatives that included the object part labels (enfrente de, al lado de). Nor was there evidence to support the positive pole hypothesis that in front of items would be easier than behind. Performance was best when the children themselves were the reference object, next best with a fronted object, and poorest with a nonfronted object, suggesting that preschoolers may understand projective locatives with respect to the reference object's intrinsic orientation, rather than imposing their own point of view.

On some views of language, when one uses a term to describe or label an object, a contrast is always implied. However, there is an important difference between nouns and adjectives in their contrastive use: adjectives imply a contrast between members of a single noun category, whereas nouns do not imply a contrast between members of a single adjective category. For example, describing a car as new suggests a contrast with other cars. However, labelling it as a car does not as clearly imply a contrast with other new objects. There is no logical necessity for this distinction – it is not captured by the literal meanings of words. Yet it is a conceptual distinction implicit in the use of these terms. In two studies, we tested preschool children's appreciation for this conceptual distinction, using both familiar and unfamiliar words. In Study I, 4-year-olds (but not 3-year-olds) were able to disambiguate the meanings of simple nouns and adjectives by assuming that the adjectives, unlike the nouns, implied a contrast between category members. In Study II, children selected pictures to match totally novel adjectives and nouns (e.g. the fep one, the skub). Relying on part of speech alone, they interpreted these unfamiliar nouns and adjectives differently. Implications for children's use of referential language and word-learning strategies are discussed.

This study analysed the naturalistic productions of because and so by 96 children, vaged 3; 6–9; 6, vwhile vnarrating real, vpersonal events. Few semantic errors could be construed as evidence of confused thinking; none is a confusion vdescribed by Piaget. Of the vsemantically correct causal uses, 81 % encode psychological causality, mostly statements of other people's intentions. Other analyses revealed: (1) many of the relationships encoded are highly predictable, (2) virtually all causality occurred prior to the time of narration, (3) age trends are remarkably absent, (4) because and so are used in significantly different ways even by the youngest children, (5) only eight sentences showed a vreversal of the appropriate order of cause and effect. The discrepancy between the last finding and many other laboratory studies vwhich find many such reversals may be due to the fact that children are causally linking strictly successive events only 32 % of the time; for the rest, they are encoding events that partially or completely overlap in time.

Third- and fifth-grade children, who had passed pretests of comprehension for words and sentence types used in the experiment, were tested on their ability to assign given/new roles in active, passive and cleft sentences controlled for stress. The experimental task involved a best-fit judgement that required the child to decide which one of two context sentences was the first part of a story continued by the target sentence. There was a significant difference in response to passive and cleft sentences, as opposed to actives. Despite a strong statistical tendency to perform correctly on passives and clefts, there were a substantial number of subjects who performed near chance in all sentence conditions. Five individual patterns of response to the task are identified. Strategies used by subjects in responding to the task, and the implications of the results for functionalist theories of language acquisition are discussed.

A brief theoretical statement on definition is advanced, followed by a study of the development of definition in children aged 5;0–10;0. The empirical findings suggest that the emergence of superordinate terms in definition cannot be adequately accounted for simply by appeal to changes in underlying knowledge, or to selectional restrictions on the structure of the definiens. Rather, the development of definition can best be characterized as the gradual articulation of a conventional definitional form out of the more general forms of ordinary oral discourse. It is suggested that definitions are expressions of word meaning that reflect the unique requirements of a literate register, and that the increasing dominance of superordinate terms in definitions reflects in part the adoption of this conventional form of expression.

With various descriptions of adults' speech to children in hand, investigators have turned their attention to questions concerning the specific nature and extent of relationships between aspects of input and language development. Answering such questions requires some conceptualization of the potential relationships that may exist. Equally important, though, are the statistical and design issues surrounding the inference of these relationships. An exhaustive discussion of these issues is beyond the scope of this Note. Consequently, we will focus on three specific topics: (1) the use of gain scores; (2) aspects of correlation and alternative procedures that have an impact on the validity and interpretability of statistical findings; and (3) passive observation versus experimental manipulation.

Ninio & Bruner (1978) added an important dimension to the study of early lexical acquisition by drawing attention to the dialogue-like nature of the mother-child interactions where presumably much language-learning takes place. The authors pointed to the well-established findings that much of the child's early speech consists of names for people and objects (Leopold 1949, Werner & Kaplan 1963, Nelson 1973, Greenfield & Smith 1976). They went on to show that in one familiar type of parent–child interaction, joint picture-book reading, labels are used extensively by the adult and are inserted skilfully into a structured interactional sequence that has the texture of a dialogue (Ninio & Bruner 1978: 6). This dialogue, they suggested, ‘seems… to be a format well suited to the teaching of labelling’ (1978: 12). Subsequent research has also been interpreted as pointing to the teaching potential of joint picture-book reading (Wheeler 1983, Ninio 1983) and the opportunities it affords for situation-specific routines (Snow & Goldfield 1983).

Throughout this century observers have commented on the beginning talker's evident preference for words denoting ‘father’ over words representing the meaning of ‘mother’. Bateman (1917) said that ‘the most frequently named object is the paternal parent’. Leopold (1948) stated that ‘papa…appears far more commonly as the first meaningful word than does mama’. In this paper I will review some of the reported data on parent reference and propose a phonetic account of the child's evident preference for paternal terms.