This study examines Lithuanian children's acquisition of gender agreement using an elicited production task. Lithuanian is a richly inflected Baltic language, with two genders and seven cases. Younger (N=24, mean 3 ; 1, 2 ; 5–3 ; 8) and older (N=24, mean 6 ; 3, 5 ; 6–6 ; 9) children were shown pictures of animals and asked to describe them after hearing the animal's name. Animal names differed with respect to familiarity (novel vs. familiar), derivational status (diminutive vs. simplex) and gender (masculine vs. feminine). Analyses of gender-agreement errors based on adjective and pronoun usage indicated that younger children made more errors than older children, with errors more prevalent for novel animal names. For novel animals, and for feminine nouns, children produced fewer errors with nouns introduced in diminutive form. These results complement findings from several Slavic languages (Russian, Serbian and Polish) that diminutives constitute a salient cluster of word forms that may provide an entry point for the child's acquisition of noun morphology.

This study measured longitudinal change in six parameters of infant utterances (i.e. number of sounds, CV syllables, supraglottal consonants, and repetitions per utterance, temporal duration, and seconds per sound), investigated previously unexplored characteristics of repetition (i.e. number of vowel and CV syllable repetitions per utterance) and analyzed change in vocalizations in relation to age and developmental milestones using multilevel models. Infants (N=18) were videotaped bimonthly during naturalistic and semi-structured activities between 0 ; 3 and the onset of word use (M=11·8 months). Results showed that infant utterances changed in predictable ways both in relation to age and in relation to language milestones (i.e. reduplicated babble onset, word comprehension and word production). Looking at change in relation to the milestones of language development led to new views of babbling, the transition from babbling to first words, and processes that may underlie these transitions.

How do Turkish children differ from adults in sensitivity to the commonality of their partner's perspective with their own in producing referential language? Fifteen five- to six-year-olds, 15 nine- to ten-year-olds and 15 adults were asked to tell a confederate to pick up an object across three conditions: the common ground condition, in which two similar objects with one contrastive feature were visible to both the participants and the confederate; the privileged ground condition, in which one of the two similar objects was available only to the participant; and the baseline condition, in which there were no competing objects. Age-related increases were found from preschool ages into adulthood in the production of (a) discriminating adjectives in the common ground trials, and (b) requestive speech acts with verbal constructions, rather than noun-only labels. A follow-up study with preschoolers (N=15) prompted for requestive speech acts, leading to an increase in discriminating adjectives.

In the linguistics field, liaison in French is interpreted as an indicator of interactions between the various levels of language organization. The current study examines the same issue while adopting a developmental perspective. Five experiments involving children aged two to six years provide evidence for a developmental scenario which interrelates a number of different issues: the acquisition of phonological alternations, the segmentation of new words, the long-term stabilization of the word form in the lexicon and the formation of item-based constructions. According to this scenario, children favour the presence of initial CV syllables when segmenting stored chunks of speech of the type word1-liaison-word2 (les arbres ‘the trees’ is segmented as /le/+/zarbr/). They cope with the variation of the liaison in the input by memorizing multiple exemplars of the same word2 (/zarbr/, /narbr/). They learn the correct relations between the word1s and the word2 exemplars through exposure to the well-formed sequence (un+/narbr/, deux+/zarbr/). They generalize the relation between a word1 and a class of word2 exemplars beginning with a specific liaison consonant by integrating this information into an item-based schema (e.g. un+/nX/, deux+/zX/). This model is based on the idea that the segmentation of new words and the development of syntactic schemas are two aspects of the same process.

This study examines pragmatic differentiation in early trilingual development through a longitudinal analysis of language choice in a developing Tagalog–Spanish–English trilingual child. The child's patterns of language choice with different language users are analyzed at age 1 ; 10 and 2 ; 4 to examine: (1) whether evidence for pragmatic differentiation can be found even before age two and in simultaneous interactions with distinct language users; (2) whether lexical gaps determine the child's choice of one language over another; and (3) whether her patterns of language choice are affected by the interlocutors language use and their responses to mixing. The results indicate that the child was capable of selecting the appropriate language according to the interlocutors' language from the earliest sessions. However, switches to inappropriate languages were common due to vocabulary gaps, the interlocutors' acceptance of mixing and the possibilities determined by the existence of multiple lexical resources and multiple language users.

The study examines prosodic characteristics of Hebrew speech directed to children between 0 ; 9–3 ; 0 years, based on longitudinal samples of 228,946 tokens (8,075 types). The distribution of prosodic patterns – the number of syllables and stress patterns – is analyzed across three lexical categories, distinguishing not only between open- and closed-class items, but also between these two categories and a third, innovative, class, referred to as between-class items. Results indicate that Hebrew CDS consists mainly of mono- and bisyllabic words, with differences between lexical categories; and that the most common stress pattern is word-final, with parallel distributions found for all categories. Additional analyses showed that verbs take word-final stress, but nouns are both trochaic and iambic. Finally, a developmental analysis indicates a significant increase in the number of iambic words in CDS. These findings have clear implications regarding the use of prosody for word segmentation and assignment of lexical class in infancy.

The purpose of the present study was to explore the contribution of phonological and general language skills to reading fluency of pointed and unpointed Hebrew scripts. Reading, language and memory tasks were performed by 48 fifth-grade monolingual native Hebrew speakers. Results showed that the most marked predictor for both pointed and unpointed reading texts was the morphological measure, whereas the phonological awareness measure contributed to neither of them. The semantic and syntactic measures contributed only to unpointed text reading fluency. The discussion highlights how readers in script, such as unpointed Hebrew, rely on general language skills in order to achieve fluent reading.

We assessed the effect of specificity of speaker information about an object on three-year-olds' word mappings. When children heard a novel label followed by specific information about an object at exposure, children subsequently mapped the label to that object at test. When children heard only specific information about an object at exposure, they inferred that the label applied to a different object at test. Finally, non-specific information did not assist children in mapping a word to an object. Thus, children use speaker information as a word-mapping cue but this information is interpreted differently depending on how the discourse is initiated.

The present study investigated three-year-olds' sensitivity to direct and indirect cues to others' knowledge states for word learning purposes. Children were given either direct, physical cues to knowledge or indirect, verbal cues to knowledge. Preschoolers revealed a better ability to learn words from a speaker following direct, physical cues to their knowledge state. Implications for children's emerging pragmatic competence are discussed.