Attempts to measure phonological acquisition have largely focused on segments, with less effort made to examine whole-word productions. This article proposes four measures designed to estimate a child's whole-word abilities: 1. the PHONOLOGICAL MEAN LENGTH OF UTTERANCE, a measure of whole-word complexity for both child and target words, 2. the PROPORTION OF WHOLE-WORD PROXIMITY, a measure of the proximity between the child's word and its target form, 3. the PROPORTION OF WHOLE-WORD CORRECTNESS, a measure of the number of words produced correctly relative to the sample size, and 4. the PROPORTION OF WHOLE-WORD VARIABILITY, a measure of how often a child produces words in distinct phonological shapes. The central measure is the Phonological Mean Length of Utterance, which can be used to identify a child's stage of acquisition, to assess proximity to target words, and to evaluate the complexity of words. The value of the new measures will be demonstrated through preliminary applications to a range of contexts; i.e. monolingual children acquiring English (five children, 0;11 to 1;5), Cantonese (one child, 1;7), and Spanish (5 children, 2;2 to 2;11), bilingual children acquiring Hungarian-English (one child, 2;0) and Spanish-English (3 children, 2;4 to 2;11), children with phonological impairment (eighteen children, 2;11 to 5;3), and children with cochlear implants (six children, 4;5 to 7;11).

This paper focuses on aspects of early lexical acquisition in German. There have been conflicting results in the literature concerning both the pattern of vocabulary growth and the composition of the early lexicon. Our study describes the development of various categories of words and questions the preponderance of nouns in spontaneous speech. 32 children were studied longitudinally through recordings made at age 1;1, 1;3, 1;9 and 3;0. The following properties of the data were investigated: vocabulary size in relation to age, frequency of word use, and distribution of word categories. The results show that use of both types and tokens increases with time. A trend analysis indicates an exponential increase in vocabulary production in the second year, followed by a further expansion. This vocabulary spurt-like pattern can be observed in the use of word types and tokens. The findings in regard to vocabulary composition illustrate the dynamics present in the development of word categories. In the beginning, children use mostly relational words, personal-social words and some onomatopoeic terms. These categories are gradually complemented with nouns, verbs, function words and other words so that we see a balanced lexicon by 3;0. Trend analyses clarify characteristic developmental patterns in regard to certain word categories. Our spontaneous speech data does not support a strong noun-bias hypothesis.

Children's acquisition of the transitivity status of novel verbs was examined to test whether preemption helps children learn to avoid non-conventional uses of verbs. Given that many English verbs alternate between transitive and intransitive usage (e.g. break, roll), how do children learn the fixed transitive status of verbs such as hit or the fixed intransitive status of verbs such as fall? 48 four-year-olds and 48 six- and seven-year-olds learned two novel verbs, with one verb modelled as transitive and the other as intransitive. Exposure conditions varied the occurrence and type of preemptive evidence potentially facilitating learning of the verbs' transitivity status. In comparison to a No Preemption group, only six- to seven-year-olds exposed to novel verbs in alternative constructions (that allowed them to talk about the actions from the perspective of the agent or patient without changing the verbs' assigned transitivity) produced fewer utterances violating the verbs' fixed transitivity. The results identify limits in children's usage of indirect negative evidence in acquiring verb argument structure constructions.

This study investigated different accounts of early argument structure acquisition and verb paradigm building through the detailed examination of the acquisition of the verb Go. Data from 11 children followed longitudinally between the ages of 2;0 and 3;0 were examined. Children's uses of the different forms of Go were compared with respect to syntactic structure and the semantics encoded. The data are compatible with the suggestion that the children were not operating with a single verb representation that differentiated between different forms of Go but rather that their knowledge of the relationship between the different forms of Go varied depending on the structure produced and the meaning encoded. However, a good predictor of the children's use of different forms of Go in particular structures and to express particular meanings was the frequency of use of those structures and meanings with particular forms of Go in the input. The implications of these findings for theories of syntactic category formation and abstract rule-based descriptions of grammar are discussed.

This paper examines two- to five-year-old children's knowledge of inversion in English yes/no questions through a new experimental study. It challenges the view that the syntax for inversion develops slowly in child English and tests the hypothesis that grammatical competence for inversion is present from the earliest testable ages of the child's sentence production. The experimental design is based on the premise that a valid test of this hypothesis must dissociate from inversion various language-specific aspects of English grammar, including its inflectional system. An elicited imitation method was used to test parallel, lexically-matched declarative and question structures across several different verb types in a design which dissociated subject-auxiliary inversion from the English-specific realization of the inflectional/auxiliary system. Using this design, the results showed no significant difference in amount or type of children's errors between declarative (non-inverted) and question (inverted) sentences with modals or auxiliary be, but a significant difference for sentences with main verbs (requiring reconstruction of inflection through do-support) and copula be. The results from sentences with auxiliary be and those with modals indicate that knowledge of inversion is present throughout our very young sample and does not develop during this time. We argue that these results indicate that the grammar of inversion is present from the youngest ages tested. Our results also provide evidence of development relevant to the English-specific inflectional system. We conclude with a new developmental hypothesis: development in question formation occurs in integrating language-specific knowledge related to inflection with the principles of Universal Grammar which allow grammatical inversion.

Bilingual acquisition can shed light on the cues children use in acquiring language. The purpose of this paper was to examine whether frequency, ambiguity or language dominance could explain crosslinguistic transfer in compound nouns. Crosslinguistic transfer would appear in the form of compound reversals. 25 monolingual English children between the ages of three and four years and 25 age-matched French-English bilingual children were asked to create and indicate their understanding of novel compound nouns. In production, the bilingual children reversed compounds in English more often than the monolingual children but equally often in French and English. In comprehension, there were no differences between groups. These results cannot be explained by any previous explanation of transfer. Implications for the theory of language acquisition are discussed.

Grinstead (2000) argues that there is a stage in both Spanish and Catalan children's grammatical development when they are restricted to using verbs without overt subjects. However, the evidence for a ‘no overt subject’ stage in early child Spanish is based on very thin data from a single child: Juan between the ages of 1;7 and 2;1. In the present note we reanalyse the data from Juan and compare it with data from another child María at 1;7 and 1;8. Our results show that Juan produces his first overt subject during the same session as his first non-imperative verb form, and that María produces a relatively high proportion of verbs with overt subjects in both of her first two transcripts. They thus provide no support for the claim that there is a ‘no overt subject’ stage in early child Spanish.

Commenting on Goldberg's (1995) ‘construction grammar’, Tomasello (1998) proposes a model of language acquisition in which children move from highly specific utterance–event pairings to abstract, verb-general structures. Despite their many strengths, models of this kind predict considerably more overgeneralization of the argument structures of verbs than seems to occur. In recognition of this, the paper explains (and supports with data from a previously unpublished study of 44 children aged 2;0 to 4;4) how processes which are side effects of the emergence of the verb form class could counter the overgeneralizing tendencies. It is argued that these processes are consistent not just with the model proposed by Tomasello but also (in large part) with the grammatical theory developed by Goldberg.

Pre-school Korean children typically manifest higher comprehension rates on the ‘unmarked’ SOV sentences of their language than on the ‘scrambled’ OSV patterns. To date, however, scant attention has been paid to children's ordering preferences with respect to direct and indirect objects. The results of an act-out comprehension experiment involving 40 subjects (aged 4;0 to 7;0) show a strong, statistically significant preference for the accusative–dative order, despite evidence that the reverse order is more common in mother-to-child speech. Two hypotheses are considered, one involving the relationship between word order and grammatical relations and the other involving the relationship between word order and the types of situations denoted by the sentences in question. The results of a follow-up study involving transitive verbs with instrument arguments provide strong evidence in favour of the latter hypothesis.

This study presents an analysis of children's spontaneous production of words and gestures during an experimental symbol learning task. Namy & Waxman (1998) previously reported that children aged 1;6 interpreted novel arbitrary words (e.g. blicket) and manual gestures (e.g. a dropping motion) as names for object categories (e.g. fruit) but that at 2;2, children interpreted words as names more readily than gestures. Based on this finding and other observational evidence of gesture use, it has been suggested that the younger infants have an initial general symbolic capacity that encompasses both words and gestures. Over time, as infants acquire greater experience with language, words begin to take on a greater priority in the infant's communicative repertoire. The current study examines this hypothesis by analyzing children's spontaneous production of the novel symbols in Namy & Waxman's original task. At 1;6, children rarely produced either the novel words or gestures. At 2;2, children frequently produced both symbolic forms; however, words were produced in a referential manner while gestures were produced in a non-referential manner. These findings are consistent with the argument that over time, words supplant gestures as a symbolic medium.

We tested 24 caregivers of preschool children to determine whether their strategies for teaching novel adjectives are consistent with children's demonstrated abilities to learn these words (e.g. Waxman & Klibanoff, 2000). On each of four trials, caregivers had to select one of two cards, both of which showed a familiar object bearing an unfamiliar property. On the within-basic card, the object was accompanied by a second object from the same basic-level category; on the across-basic card, this second object came from a different basic-level category. Caregivers' task was to choose the card that would be more helpful to teach a novel adjective for the unfamiliar property. If the second object differed from the first in terms of a novel target property, caregivers (N = 12) stated a strong preference for the within-basic card. If the two objects agreed in terms of the novel property, caregivers (N = 12) indicated a clear preference for the across-basic card. The findings offer new insight into the speed and efficiency of lexical development, by revealing that word teachers, like word learners (cf. Waxman & Klibanoff, 2000), are sensitive to the conditions under which certain contrasts (in property or in basic-level category) are effective in promoting the successful acquisition of novel adjectives.

Twenty Japanese-speaking twenty-six- to twenty-seven-year-old women were recorded as they conversed with an infant, an elder, or another young adult. When their utterances were acoustically compared among the three settings with regard to prosodic characteristics, elevated pitch and increased pitch range were found when their speech was directed to both the infant and the elder as compared to when it was directed to the young adult. The degree to which such modifications occurred was greater in those women who were experienced with children than in those women who were not experienced. Moreover, the degree of the modification showed a highly positive correlation in each participant when the speech was directed to the infant and when it was directed to the elder. Prosodic modifications of speech styles to infants and to elders are both exaggerated consistently through the experience with children.