Five French-speaking middle-class couples and their male only-children were tape-recorded separately at home while interacting verbally in a free-play, a story-telling, and in a family meal situation. The children's ages ranged from 1; 6 to 3; 0. The speech of the fathers, mothers, and children was transcribed and analysed for its semantic, syntactic, and language-teaching aspects. The results indicate that paternal speech displays the same simplification processes usually found in maternal speech to young children. Paternal speech, however, also contains some linguistic patterns at variance with those found in maternal speech. It is hypothesised that maternal and paternal speech may be complementary in their influence on language development in the children.

Thirty children with a mean length of utterance ranging from 1·00 to 4 and an age range of 1; 7 to 5; 5 were tested by their own mothers for comprehension of two-noun possessive phrases such as mommy's shoe. Three types of possessive relationships (alienable, intrinsic and reciprocal) in addition to anomalous possessive phrases were used to uncover children's knowledge of the semantics and syntax of English possession. Results indicated, first, that even young children may have detailed notions of which objects are likely to serve as possessors and which as possessions, and second, that word order may not be used to comprehepossessive phrases until considerable linguistic development has occurred.

Fifty-two children aged 2; 5 to 6; 3 acted out the meaning of reversible passive and inverted cleft sentences. The younger children overgeneralized two strategies that led to passive sentence reversal. In order of frequency, they are: (1)‘agent + action’ (the noun preceding the verb being interpreted as agent even when it is the second noun), and (2) ‘order-of-mention’ (the first noun being treated as agent). Whereas younger children tended to use an individually consistent approach to both structures, older children were more likely to vary their approaches when they did not comprehend a structure.

The acquisition of the morphological rules for plural, agentive, and diminutive suffixes in Dutch was studied. Subjects included 7- and 12-year-old native speakers, and second-language learners in three age groups (5–10 years, 12–18 years, and adult). The first- and second-language learners showed very similar orders of acquisition for the rule systems governing plural and diminutive, but the second-language learners showed a subtle form of interference from their first language in acquiring the agentive. The findings suggest that morphological acquisition proceeds piecemeal, with the learning of specific word ending + allomorph sequences, and that generalizations at the level of morphological rules may not be made even after several years of correct performance with the allomorph in question.

Judgements of grammatical acceptability were made for correct and reversed ‘Y if X’ and ‘If X, Y’ sentences. Children aged 4; 10–8; 7 judged sentences ‘sensible’ or ‘silly’ and modified the sentences to make them ‘silly’ or ‘sensible’. Children failed to differentiate correct and reversed-order sentences prior to age 7 or 8. There was no evidence of an order-of-mention response strategy, but ‘If X, Y’ and ‘If Y, X’ sentences were easier to judge than ‘Y if X’ and ‘X if Y’, suggesting that children prefer sentences in which stated order parallels temporal order. The strategies used to modify the sentences changed with age from content changes to order reversals. The modifications suggested that contingency becomes a component of the meaning of if before the child assigns unidirectional event order as a component of if.

The present study asked three questions. To what extent does the pre-school child use pronouns ambiguously in a naturalistic situation? Under what circumstances is such referential ambiguity likely to arise? How does the pre-school listener respond to such ambiguity? Sixteen pre-schoolers, four pairs of boys and four pairs of girls, were videotaped in a play situation. The results indicate that ambiguity of reference frequently arises, especially when disambiguation can be achieved only by verbal rather than non-verbal information. The presence of such ambiguity did not, however, influence the social responsiveness of the listener.

This paper presents a study of children's ability to recognize the presuppositions of sentences with factive and nonfactive verbs, and a review of recent research on the acquisition of factive presuppositions. In the present study, subjects in grades K, 2, 5 and 8, and adults, were asked to judge the truth of the complement clauses of sentences of the form ‘Doctor Fact (verb) that the ball is (is not) blue.’ The task was presented in the context of a television quiz show, with subjects as putative contestants. A tendency was found among younger subjects to overgeneralize the scope of negation of complement verbs into the main clauses of factive sentences. A gradual increase in comprehension of factive and nonfactive verbs was found, extending into adolescence. In a comparison of the present results with those of several recent studies, marked differences were found in the age of acquisition of factivity. These differences are discussed in terms of variations in task requirements and assessment techniques. It is concluded that acquisition proceeds on a verb-by-verb basis, rather than as a unitary process.

This paper presents a hypothesis-testing theory of syntax acquisition. The first section presents our model. We claim that: (1) children learn a transformational grammar, including a set of phrase structure and transformational rules; (2) linguistic universals and Occam's razor constrain the initial hypothesis space available to the device; (3) hypotheses tested by the device consist of candidate phrase structure and transformational rules; (4) linguistic evidence confirms or disconfirms hypotheses. Specific examples of incorrect phrase structure and transformational hypotheses are presented.

The second section briefly surveys other approaches to language acquisition – both syntactic and non-syntactic – and compares them to our model. In the third section, we address several methodological issues: (1) the relevance of linguistic theory to the model; (2) how the model is tested; (3) the domain of the theory.

Ostensive definitions of words are ambiguous as to their referent. In a study of 40 mother–infant dyads engaged in looking at picture-books, it was found that 95% of ostensive definitions referred to the whole object depicted, rather than to its parts, attributes or actions. On the rare occasions when mothers named parts of objects, they avoided misunderstanding of the level of reference either by naming the part immediately after naming the whole, or by including a reference to the whole in the definition of the part. What's that? questions are not used to request labelling of the part.

It is argued that previous assessments of children's knowledge of the hard to see type of construction were confounded by a variety of extra-linguistic factors. Therefore, the relatively delayed age of comprehension previously reported (6½–8 years) may have been due to younger children's deficiencies in extralinguistic skills. In the present study, with these extralinguistic complications eliminated, the passing age was found to be 5 years, and even 4-year-olds evidenced considerable knowledge of the target structure. Other findings were: variation in sentence difficulty as a function of the syntactic and/or aspectual character of the verb; high test–retest reliability at all levels of performance; and a necessary-but-not-sufficient empirical relation between comprehension of the target construction and the passive. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for the acquisition of this particular structure and for the general problem of detecting linguistic competence from performance.

The ‘fis phenomenon’ and similar anecdotal evidence, which appears to give insight into child phonology, and also certain experiments designed to reveal the nature of homonymy in child language, are discussed with reference to an approach which distinguishes between eight different types of possible phonetic episode. It is concluded that the anecdotes and experiments are less instructive than is often supposed.

We regret that the review of Tatiana Slama-Cazacu, Dialogue in children, published in Vol. 6, No. 2 (June 1979), pp. 394–6, failed to point out that the original date of publication of this work was 1961. The date given, 1977, was that of the English translation. We apologize to Professor Slama-Cazacu for any false impression given by this editorial ommission.