Children who have normal language development are aware of the distinction between closed-class and open-class words at a very early age. In order to test to what extent children know the closed class to be, in fact, closed, 104 children aged 3 to 5 years participated in a sentence repetition task. Each sentence contained a nonsense word that fulfilled either an open-class or a closed-class function. Children were more likely to repeat sentences correctly when the nonsense words functioned in open-class, rather than in closed-class, contexts. In addition, older children correctly repeated more sentences containing nonsense words that functioned in closed-class contexts than younger children. This last result shows a mechanism by which children may acquire new closed-class words. The theoretical implications of the results are also discussed relative to children with specific language impairments, especially in terms of their reliance on semantic value in word acquisition.

This study investigates the development of two levels of morphological knowledge that contribute to Spanish-English bilingual students’ ability to recognize cognates: the ability to recognize a cognate stem within a suffixed English word, and knowledge of systematic relationships between Spanish and English suffixes (e.g., the fact that words ending in -ty in English often have a Spanish cognate ending in -dad). A total of 196 Latino bilingual students in 4th, 6th, and 8th grade were asked to give the Spanish equivalent for English words, some of which had derivational and inflectional suffixes. The results indicated that the students’ ability to translate cognates increased with age above and beyond any increase in their vocabulary knowledge in Spanish and English. There was also marked growth in the students’ knowledge of systematic relationships between Spanish and English suffixes. Students recognized cognate stems of suffixed words more easily than noncognate stems, suggesting that, in closely related languages such as Spanish and English, cross-language transfer may play a role, not just in recognizing individual words, but also in the learning of derivational morphology.

Phonological working memory and auditory processing skills were investigated in a group of language-disordered children with central auditory processing (CAP) difficulties. Comparisons were made with two groups of control children, one group matched on chronological age and nonverbal intelligence and the other matched on language age. The CAP disordered children showed poorer abilities in nonword repetition and word recall. In agreement with earlier findings in language-disordered children (Gathercole & Baddeley, 1990), the CAP disordered children were sensitive to the phonological similarity and word length of the recall lists. However, contrary to earlier findings, the CAP disordered children in the present study also showed poorer phoneme discrimination skills. These findings may be inconsistent with the notion of one central deficit (poor phonological working memory) in CAP disordered children with a language deficit.

Recent models of antonymy differ over the involvement of associative and conceptual connections in the representation of direct and indirect antonyms. To assess these models, subjects were presented with two sequential adjectives. In the first study they made relatedness judgments, and in the second study they made antonym and synonym judgments. Conceptual processes were manipulated by varying semantic distance, and associative processes were manipulated by varying lexical markedness. Judgments were fastest for direct antonyms, even when compared to synonyms of similar relatedness. Although judgments for synonyms were faster than for indirect antonyms, semantic distance and markedness had similar effects on these word classes. These results suggest that direct antonymy may utilize associative connections, but that indirect antonymy, like synonymy, relies primarily on conceptual connections.

Since the publication of Nelson's (1973) monograph, several studies have reported significant correlations between variation in children's early vocabulary composition and differences in the functional characteristics of mothers' child-directed speech. However, it is still not clear how these relations are actually mediated. The present study attempts to investigate thís issue by differentiating and testing two alternative explanations of the relations found in previous research on data from a study of eight mother–infant dyads between 0;11 and 1;8. Despite replicating previous findings of a relation between maternal descriptiveness and the proportion of nouns and maternal directiveness and the proportion of verbs in children's early vocabularies, the results reveal no relation between differences in mothers' interactional behavior and differences in the functional characteristics of their children's spontaneous speech. On the other hand, specific relations were found between children's referential vocabularies and maternal descriptives that included nouns and between children's verb vocabularies and maternal directives that included verbs. These findings not only raise doubts about the validity of a functional similarity account of relations between maternal speech characteristics and variation in early vocabulary composition, but also suggest that they may be better understood in terms of the interaction between processing mechanisms that are common to all children and differences in the structure of the input to which different children are actually exposed.

This is an investigation of the relationships among selected aspects of normal language development, emerging metalinguistic skills, concepts about print, and family literacy experiences in 3-year-old children who vary in their socioeconomic backgrounds. Forty-three normally developing children, whose family incomes ranged from under $10,000 to over $100,000, were given 4 tests of language development; 12 metalinguistic tasks measuring phonological awareness, word awareness, and structural awareness; and 2 measures of literacy knowledge. The children's family literacy experiences were described following a parent interview. The data analysis had two main purposes. The first was to examine the family literacy experiences of the children using a qualitative analysis. The second was to describe, in a quantitative way, the relationships among family literacy experiences, socioeconomic factors, language development, metalinguistic performance, and concepts about print. The interview data revealed that, while parents varied in the emphasis they placed on literacy activities, all of the children were at least somewhat involved in literacy activities at home; family report of literacy activities was associated with family income. Quantitative analyses revealed that amount of family literacy involvement and the children's race were related to oral language development, and language development was the most powerful predictor of metalinguistic awareness. When language development was controlled statistically, family literacy and socioeconomic factors had negligible effects on metalinguistic skills; however, knowledge of print concepts was related to metalinguistic performance, especially in the phonological domain, and was associated with the children's family literacy experiences, maternal education, and race.