Schaeffer (1997, 2000) argues that children lack knowledge of specificity because Dutch children omit determiners and fail to scramble pronouns. Avrutin & Brun (2001), however, find that Russian children place arguments correctly according to whether they are specific or non-specific. This paper investigates object agreement and specificity in early Swahili. Object agreement in Swahili is obligatory when the object is specific, but is prohibited when the object is non-specific. Analysis of naturalistic data from four Swahili-speaking children (1;8–3;2) reveals that children overwhelmingly provide object agreement in obligatory contexts (when the object is a personal name, is topicalized, or refers to first/second person). The supply of object agreement cannot be due to a general strategy of overusing agreement, since object agreement does not occur in prohibited contexts such as intransitive clauses. I conclude that object agreement and knowledge of specificity are acquired by Swahili children before the age of two years.

We hypothesize that the conceptual relation between a verb and its direct object can make a sentence easier (‘the cat is eating some food’) or harder (‘the cat is eating a sock’) to parse and understand. If children's limited performance systems contribute to the ungrammatical brevity of their speech, they should perform better on sentences that require fewer processing resources: children should imitate the constituents of sentences with highly predictable direct objects at a higher rate than those from sentences with less predictable objects. In Experiment 1, 24 two-year-olds performed an elicited imitation task and confirmed that prediction for all three major constituents (subject, verb, direct object). In Experiment 2, 23 two-year-olds performed both an elicited imitation task and a sticker placement task (in which they placed a sticker on the pictured subject of the sentence after hearing and imitating the sentence). Children imitated verbs more often from predictable than unpredictable sentences, but not subjects or objects. Children's inclusion of constituents is affected by the conceptual relations among those constituents as well as by task characteristics.

The acquisition of German plurals has been the focus of controversy in the last decade. In this paper we claim that degree of productivity (i.e. the capacity of nouns to form potential plurals) plays a key role in determining pace of acquisition. A plural elicitation task was administered to 84 Viennese German-speaking children aged 2;6 to 6;0. Analyses of correct responses showed that the highest scores were obtained with -e plurals, followed by the plural markers -e +U, -er +U, -s and -(e)n. The lowest score was observed for pure Umlaut (U) plurals. Analyses suggested an impact of productivity on the number of correct scores: fully productive and productive plural patterns obtained higher correct scores than weakly productive and non-productive ones. The results of the study support our productivity scale and are compatible both with single-route models and with a race-model variant of the dual-route view.

Pragmatic development requires the ability to use linguistic forms, along with non-verbal cues, to focus an interlocutor's attention on a referent during conversation. We investigate the development of this ability by examining how the use of demonstratives is learned in Turkish, where a three-way demonstrative system (bu, şu, o) obligatorily encodes both distance contrasts (i.e. proximal and distal) and absence or presence of the addressee's visual attention on the referent. A comparison of the demonstrative use by Turkish children (6 four- and 6 six-year-olds) and 6 adults during conversation shows that adultlike use of attention directing demonstrative, şu, is not mastered even at the age of six, while the distance contrasts are learned earlier. This language specific development reveals that designing referential forms in consideration of recipient's attentional status during conversation is a pragmatic feat that takes more than six years to develop.

The study investigates a social–pragmatic expectation that may motivate children to search their environment when asked for the referent of a novel label. In one experimental phase, the experimenter presented 40 two-year-olds a bucket containing a novel object and another visible object – either familiar or novel. The experimenter either asked children for the referent of a novel label, or a non-specific question. In a second experimental phase, all children saw a bucket containing a novel object, and two visible objects – one familiar and one novel. We found that, in both phases, children tended to bypass the visible novel object, preferring instead to search inside the bucket for the referent of a novel label. These findings are consistent with an expectation – dubbed the EXPECTATION OF COMPETENCE – that if an adult asks a child for the referent of a name, it is because the adult likely believes that the child knows that name, and thus the child can expect to be capable of finding its referent.

Multivariate genetic analysis was used to examine the genetic and environmental aetiology of the interrelationships of diverse linguistic skills. This study used data from a large sample of 4½-year-old twins who were tested on measures assessing articulation, phonology, grammar, vocabulary, and verbal memory. Phenotypic analysis suggested two latent factors: articulation (2 measures) and general language (the remaining 7), and a genetic model incorporating these factors provided a good fit to the data. Almost all genetic and shared environmental influences on the 9 measures acted through the two latent factors. There was also substantial aetiological overlap between the two latent factors, with a genetic correlation of 0·64 and shared environment correlation of 1·00. We conclude that to a large extent, the same genetic and environmental factors underlie the development of individual differences in a wide range of linguistic skills.

Phonological awareness is thought to become increasingly analytic during early childhood. This study examines whether the proposed developmental sequence (syllable→onset-rime→phoneme) varies according to the characteristics of a child's native language. Experiment 1 compares the phonological segmentation skills of English speakers aged 4;11 (N=10), 5;3 (N=21), and 6;5 (N=23) and French speakers aged 5;6 (N=35), and 6;8 (N=34). Experiment 2 assesses performance in the common unit task using English speakers aged 4;7 (N=22), 5;7 (N=23), and 6;11 (N=22), and French speakers aged 4;7 (N=20), 5;6 (N=35), and 6;7 (N=33). The experiments reveal crosslinguistic differences in the processing of syllables prior to school entry with French speakers exhibiting a greater consistency in manipulating syllables. Phoneme awareness emerges in both languages once reading instruction is introduced and rime awareness appears to follow rather than precede this event. Thus, the emergence of phonological awareness did not show a universal pattern but rather was subject to the influence of both native language and literacy.

The English orthography is morphophonemic: spellings encode both morphemes and phonemes. Questions of the starting point and extent of young children's understanding of the link between morphemes and spelling are important for theories of spelling development. We conducted two experiments to address these issues. In Experiment 1, 65 six- to eight-year-old English-speaking children spelled just the first sections of inflected, derived and control words. Their spelling of these first segments was better in inflected and derived words than in control words. The findings were replicated in Experiment 2 with 78 six- to eight-year-old children spelling a greater number of items. These two studies converge on the conclusion that, in specific testing situations, six- to eight-year-old children appreciate the role of root morphemes in the spelling of both inflected and derived words. These results are discussed in relation to current models of spelling development.

This study examined the effect of lexical aspect on children's imitation accuracy of English tense-aspect morphology. Thirty-five typically developing children, ages 2;4 to 3;1, imitated sentence-pairs in which the same regular verb was used once in an activity (skip on the rug) and once in an accomplishment (skip out the door). Children imitated past-imperfective morphology equally well in accomplishments and activities, but they imitated past-perfective morphology with higher accuracy in accomplishments than activities. These findings suggest that children's early morphology development is influenced by lexical aspect conveyed at the sentence level, as predicted by the PROTOTYPE HYPOTHESIS.

Due to an administrative error, the following two papers were published as ‘General articles’ in the February 2006 issue of the journal. Both should have been published in the ‘Notes’ section. This will be amended and listed correctly in the volume contents to be published in the November issue.