The fundamental frequency F0 patterns of maternal speech addressed to infants aged 0;3–0;4 were measured quantitatively. Speech samples were recorded when six Japanese-speaking mothers addressed an adult and their own infants. Japanese mothers speaking to adults use a relatively restricted F0 range, concentrated around the mother's F0, which tends to be near the low end of the total range used. These acoustic characteristics are not altered substantially when these same women speak to their infants in initial utterances to attract the infants' attention. If such attempts are unsuccessful, however, they are likely to make more exaggerated utterances, in which F0 shifts upward and the frequency range is significantly increased. Moreover, only when acoustic characteristics of maternal speech to infants are exaggerated, can the type of F0 contour of the infant's subsequent response be predicted to a significant extent from the mother's preceding utterance.

This investigation focuses upon an outstanding aspect of child phonology – that of consonant harmony, relabelled ‘phonological harmony’ – and inquires whether representational or processing deficits are responsible for its occurrence. A detailed analysis of the oral output of one German-speaking girl (2;7.15–2;11) supports the contention that the Imperfect Processing Model fares much better in accounting for her harmony strategy than the Incomplete Representation Model. It is established that bilabial harmony is the only type of assimilation she has recourse to, and that this process is mainly used to cope with difficult sounds, although it also implicates consonants which do not pose a production problem. The difficult sounds are arguably not absent from the child's system because they can be uttered in some positions though not in others. The harmonizing tendency is interpreted within the interactive activation model of language production and is claimed to emanate from two particularities of her processing system. She has represented even the difficult elements as network nodes, but some connections between the segment and the feature level are ill developed. As a result, activation cannot spread smoothly between these levels and the relevant units cannot be made available for production. In addition, an excessive linkage strength has been built up among the node [bilabial] and all its associates at the segment level. This puts bilabial consonants into a state of hyperactivation and allows them even to intrude upon those segments which have been perfectly mastered. It is finally shown why these two mechanisms are very unlikely to become permanent features of the child's processing system.

Comparison of patterns of cluster realization from 47 children ranging in age from 3;4 to 6;8 with functional (non-organic) speech disorders with those reported in the literature for normal acquisition reveals that these patterns are essentially the same for both groups. Using a two-level generative phonology for children's independent systems, further analysis of cluster realizations by means of feature geometry and under-specification theory reveals that there are systematic and principled relationships between adult representations of clusters and children's underlying representations and between children's underlying representations and their phonetic representations. With special emphasis on coalescence phenomena, it is suggested that the apparent diversity in children's cluster realizations can be reduced to four constraints on the form of underlying and phonetic representations.

The existence of stylistic variation between children in the early stages of language acquisition has been most frequently studied using Nelson's 0973) referential—expressive distinction. While the use of this distinction has generated a great deal of interesting research, there are a number of major problems associated with it. The present study presents a simple scheme, based on formal categories, for coding stylistic variation in the early lexicon. When applied to the first 50 and 100 words of 12 children collected between 0; 11 and 2; 3, the major dimensions of difference are found to be the relative proportion of common nouns and the relative proportion of frozen phrases. Moreover, the proportion of frozen phrases is also found to be significantly positively related to children's early productivity, suggesting that, rather than being a ‘deadend’ in early language development, the acquisition of frozen phrases may provide an alternative route into multiword speech.

Two studies of verb learning are reported. The focus of both studies was on children in their second year of life learning verbs in various pragmatic contexts. Of particular interest was the comparison of ostensive contexts – in which word and referent were simultaneously present in the child's perceptual field – to non-ostensive contexts. In a naturalistic study of 24 children at 1;3 and 1;9, it was found that mothers modelled verbs for their children most often BEFORE the referent action actually occurred. Over 60% of maternal verbs were used to refer to actions that mothers wished children to perform or that they were anticipating their performing (IMPENDING actions). Some verbs were also used to refer to current actions (ONGOING actions) or actions that had just been completed (COMPLETED actions). Children responded with comprehension most often to impending models. Impending and completed models, but not ongoing models, were correlated with children's verb vocabularies at 1;9. The second study was a lexical training study of 48 two-year-olds. Children learned to produce a novel verb best when it was modelled in the impending condition. They learned to comprehend it equally well in the impending and completed conditions. Children showed no signs of superior learning in the ostensive (ongoing) learning context. Results of the two studies are discussed in terms of the different learning processes involved in acquiring nouns and verbs, and, more broadly, in terms of a social-pragmatic view of language acquisition in which the ostensive teaching paradigm is but one of many contexts in which children learn to establish a joint attentional focus with mature language users.

Young children's slips of the tongue are a rich source of information about developing language processing and storage mechanisms. This paper presents an analysis of 907 slips from 32 children, ages 1;4–6;0, collected in naturalistic settings. It is found that these children make most of the same types and proportions of slips as adults: phonological errors outnumber lexical, which exceed phrasal. In phonological errors, anticipations are most common, followed by perseverations and exchanges; children make more completed anticipations and exchanges than adults, probably due to less mature self-monitoring. Like adults, children make more substitutions than additions or omissions. Children's slips support a theory of speech planning in which propositional, syntactic, intonational, content word, function word and phonological levels have somewhat independent status; however, there is little evidence for a derivational morphology level at this age.

This study involves the analysis of a kind of data not often found in the literature: spontaneous story-telling without an audience and therefore free of any direct influence from another person. The stories are told by a bilingual four-year-old, with examples from both English and French. In comparing the data from both languages, it was found that the French narratives contained a much larger percentage of modifiers (adjectives, adverbs and relative clauses) and employed a greater variety of tenses, which were manipulated to highlight various parts of the story. Comparison with data from children's books in the two languages largely supports the interlinguistic differences in the oral data.

This study focuses on the development of epistemic modality, with particular attention to how French children evaluate the conditions of use for modal expressions marking certainty and uncertainty. Sixty children aged four, six and eight were shown films involving verbal interactions in which a target speaker accused another of having performed a deed. The analysis examine children's responses during a subsequent interview in which they were asked to attribute an epistemic attitude of certainty/uncertainty to the target speaker as a function of three factors: (a) whether he had witnessed the deed; (b) whether his accusation was modalized by the verb croire (‘think/believe’); and (c) whether the accusation was true or false. The results show that the four-and six-year-olds attribute certainty more often than the eight-year-olds. This dissymmetry is accompanied by a developmental progression in children's conceptions of these modal categories, which change from a ‘realistic’ conception (mainly based on truth/falsity) at four years to an increasingly metalinguistic and relativized conception thereafter.

Several studies have argued that children under the ages of nine or ten years rarely comprehend figurative language and therefore interpret it literally. Cacciari & Levorato (1989). showed that when idioms are presented within a rich informational environment, children are able to grasp the figurative sense at the age of seven, and also that children are less able to produce idioms than to comprehend them. In three experiments involving 264 children (whose age ranged from 6;9 to 11;9), we contrasted this global elaboration hypothesis with a partially alternative one, the acquisition via exposure hypothesis, according to which the frequency of exposure of children to idioms is the main factor explaining their acquisition and production. Results showed that familiarity (i.e. frequency of exposure) plays a minor role and only for children who are not yet able to use contextual information. Familiarity per se does not adequately explain how children acquire a figurative competence. A tentative model is proposed in order to account for figurative competence acquisition.

With the increasing use of computers in language research, there is a need for caution concerning several new issues of data accountability. This paper presents four principles for archive-based language research: Maximum Readability and Minimum Bias; Consistent Encoding for exhaustive computer search; Systematic Contrastiveness; and Data Comparability in elicitation, transcription and coding. These and related principles are illustrated by examples from existing computer archives, and strategies are suggested for minimizing detrimental effects of violations. Finally, the paper describes some implications of the principles for properties of a field-wide and international standard of transcription of language data.

Edwards (1992) presents a set of examples from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) as prototypes of bad transcription practice. Her discussion is based upon four basic confusions. First, Edwards confuses old and discarded versions of CHAT with current CHAT. Second, she confuses the relation between CHAT standards with the implementation of these standards during the process of reformatting older corpora. Third, she confuses transcription for automatic analysis with transcription for documentation. Fourth, she confuses the CHAT guidelines with the larger CHILDES system. We argue that these confusions have misled Edwards into developing an overly rigid set of principles for data analysis which, if followed literally, could choke off progress in the analysis of spontaneous language samples.

This study of parents with their children demonstrates irregular and unpredictable grammatical features in their child-directed speech. The parents were observed quarterly in parent-child interaction with their oldest child beginning when she was two-years old, and with their younger twin daughters beginning when they reached two years. Language samples were transcribed and analyzed using CHILDES. The parents used grammatical speech with adults. A high proportion (8% to 32% per session) of their utterances to the children contained non-dialectal errors, primarily omissions of closed-class items. A typical example was ‘she a puppet’. The evidence suggests these parents were trying to teach their children language. Their implicit theories of language and learning led to a highy unusual variant of parentese.