Discrimination of synthetically produced stimuli differing along the voice onset time continuum was assessed for infants and adults within the context of the Visually Reinforced Infant Speech Discrimination (VRISD) paradigm. English-learning infants' discrimination abilities were compared with two groups of English-speaking adults (a phonetically naive and a phonetically sophisticated group). Contrary to the predictions of the innateness hypothesis, English-learning infants showed evidence of discrimination only across the English phoneme boundary. Adults, on the other hand, were very successful in discriminating both across and within a range of phoneme boundaries. These results are discussed in terms of the presumed relationship between categorical perception and linguistic processing and in terms of synthetic speech continua.

A number of phonologists have observed the frequent occurrence of ‘devoiced’ obstruents in word-final position in children's utterances. Although such transcription-based accounts have provided evidence of the phenomenon, physical phonetic properties of devoiced consonants have not been described. Therefore, characteristics of voicing control for ‘voiced’ and ‘voiceless’ stops produced by five English-speaking children aged 2; 6–3; 0, five aged 4; 0–4; 6, and five adults were investigated in terms of (1) the percentage of all stop productions evidencing ‘devoicing’ during consonant closure, and (2) in the case of devoiced stops, the proportion of consonant closure evidencing voicing. Both groups of children revealed substantial amounts of consonantal devoicing when compared with the adults; in addition, the proportion of stop closure evidencing voicing was considerably less for the children than for the adults. It was also observed, however, that the children's ‘devoiced’ stops revealed significantly more voicing than their phonemically ‘voiceless’ stop productions.

Both longitudinal and experimental evidence were used in an examination of the development of adjectives vs. inflections for the expression of size and value concepts in Italian children. The longitudinal speech production records for two Italian children suggest that the concepts of size and value are understood and expressed linguistically by 2 years. One child acquired both adjectival and inflectional expressions for size simultaneously, while the other used adjectives for size and value several months prior to the acquisition of corresponding inflections. However, both children demonstrated productive use of size inflections at around MLU 3·0. A subsequent experiment with 84 children, ranging from 2 to 6 years, suggests that comprehension of size and value inflections is restricted to a narrow, denotative set of meanings based predominately on a strict interpretation in terms of size. This pattern stands in marked contrast to adult patterns on the same experiment, in which size inflections are interpreted connotatively as well, with meanings based on positive and negative affect as well as size. The relative contribution of Connotative vs. denotative factors in the development of reference is discussed.

Longitudinal data on the development of personal inflections in Portuguese are presented. Analysis of the data reveals that, initially, the subjects used a single inflection for all verbs, regardless of the intended subject. The first formal distinction to appear was between verbs bearing the unmarked ending and those inflected for first person singular. Analyses of the acquisition of the standard first person inflections are presented in the form of rules; overgeneralization of these rules is evident, especially in perfect tense verbs. Possible explanations for the use of the third person singular verb form as the unmarked form are discussed.

Comprehension of words like here and there demands an ability to take the speaker as reference point whether or not his position agrees with one's own. Because children are known to have difficulty taking another person's viewpoint into account, it was hypothesized that children would be able to understand here and there with the speaker as reference point only after they were able to understand the terms with self as reference point. Fifty children age 2;6–3;6 were presented with two toys spaced a few feet apart and asked ‘Which one is over here/there?’ There were three conditions: E and S both sat next to (1) the same toy; (2) a different toy; and (3) E sat next to one toy while the other toy was near no-one. Contrary to the hypothesis, it was found that children did not comprehend the words with self as reference point first. Instead, the words appear to be understood first I with respect to an inconsistent reference point before children learn that the reference point is always the speaker.

The interrelation of semantic and communicative factors was considered in three children's single-word responses to adult questions. Parents asked more yes/no than naming questions. Children were able to use yes and no appropriately, but did not always do so. The children seemed to have related the form of yes/no questions to the use of yes/no answers, but communicatively were not always willing or able to produce yes/no answers when required. Naming questions were more often followed by appropriate than by inappropriate utterances. The relation of these findings to the importance of naming in early language acquisition, and to the findings of Horgan (1977) and Steffensen (1977) was considered.

Analysis of narratives produced spontaneously within natural conversation by children from three to five years of age found age-related increases in length, number, variety, compression, and complexity of six story elements, remoteness of narrated events, and number and variety of intra- and post-narrative listener responses made to them. These and other changes indicate a considerable growth from three to five in the amount and sophistication of information furnished by preschool narrators, particularly between three and four years, as well as in the motivation of the stories with respect to the overall conversational discourse.

The purposes of the present study was to develop a multiple-choice test of figurative language comprehension and to evaluate the development of such comprehension over a wide range of ages and children. To do this, samples of novel and frozen figures were selected from a corpus provided by elementary school children and then administered to 149 different children between 9 and 14 years. Results showed that the test produced was a reliable one, and one that produced meaningful developmental trends. In addition, differences were noted between the comprehension and production of novel and frozen figures of speech. These findings were discussed in terms of their methodological and developmental implications.

Judges were asked to identify the sex of prepubertal children by listening to their tape-recorded voices. More incorrect guesses were made of working class girls than of their male counterparts. For middle-class children, however, the pattern was reversed, with more boys being misidentified as girls than the opposite. These findings are related to work demonstrating an association between masculinity and working-class speech, and to the ‘covert prestige’ attaching to such speech as a result. Some practical implications of the results for researchers in the field of child language are also discussed.