A repertoire of polysyllabic words, produced by an approximately 2-year-old child, was analysed for primary stress application. A general rule for stress application did not emerge from the data. Instead, much variability existed among tokens of individual lexical items (which were imitative and/or spontaneous) and among different lexical items with the same stress contour, regarding the placement of primary stress. Intraword and interword variation suggested the existence of four groups of words treated differently with respect to primary stress placement. The word groups were separated by their characteristic stress contours, which were (1) conventional primary stress, (2) misplaced stress, (3) level stress, and (4) undetermined stress. In general, consistent application of conventional stress was related, significantly, with lexical items represented by primarily spontaneous tokens. Results support a view of lexical primacy during early stages of learning word stress.

Previous studies of children's knowledge of grammatical well-formedness have typically involved eliciting acceptability judgements from children. In the present study, children were expected to employ their tacit knowledge of the rules of grammar to correct sentences containing grammatical rule violations. Two groups of children (mean ages of 5;5 and 6;4) were presented with ungrammatical sentences resulting from either word-order changes or morpheme deletions. The results indicated that both groups of children performed well when presented with ungrammatical sentences containing morpheme deletions; but the performance of both groups was lower for the word-order violations, with the difference between the two types being greater for the 5-year-olds. It is argued that these results reflect differences in the extent to which the two types of rule violations rendered the original sentences meaningless.

An acting-out task and two modified forms of the token-assignment task described by Braine & Wells (1978) were used to test the ability of 72 children aged 3;0–4;6 to identify the actor in an event; in one token-assignment task the children were required to respond after watching silent enactments of transitive events, and in the other the children heard verbal descriptions of similar events. Comparison of individual response patterns across the tasks revealed that whereas 62 of the 72 children could identify the actor in the non-verbal task, 19 of them subsequently failed to perform as well when they had to base their judgement on active sentences in the verbal task; and of the 44 who responded accurately in the verbal token-assignment task only 34 responded consistently correctly when required to act out those sentences. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for the development of syntactic comprehension.

The acquisition of to in infinitive complement structure was examined in the spontaneous speech data from four children, who were observed longitudinally from two to three years of age. The children learned to as a complementizer connective in the context of a small group of verbs and other matrix forms that take a verb phrase complement. They did not learn to in the context of the complement verbs to mark the infinitive. Secondly, the children learned to with the meaning ‘direction towards’ and not as a meaningless syntactic marker. These results contribute to understanding the relation between the acquisition of complex syntax and the verb system in child language, and to evaluating traditional and contemporary linguistic theories of infinitive complement structure in English.

This study concerns the acquisition of the meaning of adversative connectives in French and German children from 7; 8 to 9; 11. French mais has both a substitutive and a contrastive use which is expressed by two different connectives in German, i.e. sondern and aber. 36 French and 36 German children were tested in a completion and a judgement task. Two hypotheses are confirmed: (a) substitutive but is easier to process and hence is acquired earlier than contrastive but; (b) the interpretation of contrastive but-sentences depends on their inferential complexity relative to a given context. A third assumption about the facilitative effect of lexical differentiation in German was only partially supported by the data. This issue needs further investigation with more languages and younger children.

The first word-formation devices children should learn, we proposed, are the most productive ones, that is, those that have the fewest structural constraints on their use and that appear most frequently in the formation of new words. Four- and five-year-old children who were asked to recall novel words with English agentive suffixes recalled the most productive suffix (-er) well and its less productive companions (-ist and -ian) very poorly. Other children who were asked to recall as agentive suffixes the non-agentive -ly (about equal in frequency to -er) together with -ist and -ian, did poorly on all three. They also substituted agentive suffixes (including -er) for the non-agentive -ly, with greater reliance on more productive forms. These data, together with previous observations, support the hypothesis that productivity affects the order in which children master word-formation devices.

Studies of locatives suggest regularities in order and age of acquisition, including systematic changes in context of use for behind and in front of. The present investigation extends earlier work by utilizing more naturalistic elicitation procedures and exploring an early use of behind and in front of with large reference objects. Thirty-three children, ages 2; 7 to 4; 7, told puppets where to look for missing objects. Results indicate an order of acquisition for English locatives which is consistent with prior reports. However, the puppet story method elicited given locatives at younger ages, and the first uses of behind occurred with large, non-featured reference objects. The patterns of use for behind and in front of suggest an acquisition process in which new conceptual resources lead to the re-analysis of object configurations and thus to new aspects of meaning.

When repeating spoken sentences, children who are good readers tend to be more accurate than poor readers because they are able to make more effective use of phonetic representation in the service of working memory (Mann, Liberman & Shankweiler 1980). This study of good and poor readers in the third grade has assessed both the repetition and comprehension of relative-clause sentences to explore more fully the association between early reading ability, spoken sentence processing and use of phonetic representation. It was found that the poor readers did less well than the good readers on sentence comprehension as well as on sentence repetition, and that their comprehension errors reflected a greater reliance on two sentence-processing strategies favoured by young children: the minimum-distance principle and conjoined-clause analysis. In general, the pattern of results is consonant with a view that difficulties with phonetic representation could underlie the inferior sentence comprehension of poor beginning readers. The finding that these children place greater reliance on immature processing strategies raises the further possibility that the tempo of their syntactic development may be slower than that of good readers.

Natural language samples of 114 children aged 6 to 12 years are analysed for instances of discourse connectivity via adverbial conjuncts and disjuncts. Conjunct use is just emerging at 6 and is limited to the encoding of a subset of possible logical relations with only one lexical item per relation (transitional now, inferential then, result so and concessive though). Developmental progress takes the form of increasing use of the same conjuncts, plus additional logical relations and an increasing repertoire of lexical items per relation. Disjunct use is rare at all ages and largely limited to really and probably. Developmental interactions between form, content and use (discourse context) are probed. The 12-year-old child falls far short of an adult rate of production but is learning a similar set of connectivity forms.

The present study investigated the expression of the part–whole semantic relation by children 3 to 12 years of age. Controlling both task format (structured vs. open-ended) and dimensions associated with experimental stimuli (part-word vs. part-object; known whole vs. unknown whole), the verbal responses of two age groups of children were analysed. While results revealed the part–whole semantic relation expressible by even the youngest children, age-group comparisons indicated that the older children preferred its use significantly more often. The part–whole semantic relation was also observed to take several linguistic forms (partitive, spatial, possessive), the selection of which varied as a function of age, task format, and type of experimental stimuli. Findings are discussed relative to issues concerning research methodology, the elicitation and assessment of children's semantic knowledge, and cognitive developmental theory.

In relatively unstructured interviews, Maratha and Brahmin children in Maharashtra, India, are asked to identify and to speak about household members, relatives, friends, and neighbours. It is argued that characteristic features of the usages and definitions of so-called ‘kin’ terms of young children as compared to those of adults reflect not only an incomplete grasp of the adult system of kinship reference, but also a quite accurate understanding of the deictic system of address in which kinship per se plays at most a peripheral role. It is further argued that, following Silverstein and Levinson, pragmatic rules of use play a major role in this address system and that, pace Piaget and others, these rules are acquired by a form of observational learning which requires that children be able to take another's point of view.

Although the role of visual perception is central to many theories of language development, researchers have disagreed sharply on the effects of blindness on the acquisition process: some claim major differences between blind and sighted children; others find great similarities. With audio-and video-recorded longitudinal data from six children (with varying degrees of vision) aged 0; 9–3; 4, we show that there ARE basic differences in early language, which appear to reflect differences in cognitive development. We focus here on early lexical acquisition and on verbal role-play, demonstrating how previous analyses have failed to observe aspects of the blind child's language system because language was considered out of the context of use. While a comparison of early vocabularies does suggest surface similarities, we found that when sighted peers are actively forming hypotheses about word meanings, totally blind children are acquiring largely unanalysed ‘labels’. They are slow to extend words and rarely overextended any. Similarly, although verbal role-play appears early, attempts to incorporate this kind of language into conversations with others reveal clear problems with reversibility – specifically, the ability to understand the role of shifting perspectives in determining word meaning. Examination of language in context suggests that blind children have difficulties in just those areas of language acquisition where visual information can provide input about the world and be a stimulus for forming hypotheses about pertinent aspects of the linguistic system.

The verbal responses of 22 second graders, 24 fourth graders and 22 sixth graders to ambiguous and clear messages were recorded. Children's referential choices were analysed. After the ambiguous messages, children (from the age of seven years) chose preferentially a referent with only the feature described in the message rather than a referent with this feature plus another one. The results support the Jackson & Jacobs' hypothesis (1982) that children use an interpretative strategy based on a presupposition about the speaker's co-operation. But the results may also support a hypothesis that children use an information-processing rule not necessarily related to a presupposition about the speaker's co-operation.

This study examined the relationship between prosodic variables in children's spontaneous speech and aspects of children's social behaviour while speaking. Twelve children aged 1; 11 to 2; 1 were videotaped in free play with an adult. Two hundred spontaneous utterances were sampled, and each utterance was psychophysically rated on loudness, pitch, and pitch range. These measurements were aggregated in a single measure of prosody for each utterance, which was related to whether or not children (a) made eye contact, (b) showed other social behaviours, or (c) showed no interactive behaviour with adults when an utterance was made. Results showed that utterances made while maintaining eye contact were on average louder and higher and more variably pitched. Such a finding indicates that children use prosodic elements of speech for communicative purposes.

I will summarize here some evidence in support of the hypothesis that the child's early combinations of two-word relations may be described simply as processes of concatenation and deletion. This implies that the utterances so produced will represent flat constructions as opposed to hierarchical ones.