The hypothesis that there is a close relationship between object permanence and early language acquisition has not been supported by most previous research. McCune-Nicolich (1981), however, performed a detailed theoretical analysis and, as a result, found a close relationship between stage 6 object permanence development and the use of relational words. Unlike previous studies which used mostly quantitative measures of language, McCune-Nicolich related object permanence to the semantic content of the child's early words. She concluded that relational words enter the child's lexicon ‘as a group’ during stage 6, due in part to the development of the cognitive abilities of that stage. The current study attempts to make this claim more specific and consequently more accurate. Relational words requiring the conceptualization of the visible displacement of objects should emerge during stage 5, those involving invisible displacements during stage 6, and those referring to more complex spatial displacements only later during the pre-operational period. Data from a longitudinal study of six 1-year-olds corroborate this more specific account.

Recent studies suggest a specific relationship between the acquisition of the word ‘gone’ and the development of the object concept. A longitudinal study investigated whether there is a similar relationship between the acquisition of words that encode success and failure, such as no, uh-oh and there, and the development of means–ends skills. A cross-sectional study investigated both these relationships. The results suggest that children acquire the word gone after they solve simple invisible displacement tasks but before they solve serial invisible displacement tasks. They also show that children acquire success/failure words after they use insight to solve the problem of the string but before they use insight to solve more difficult means–ends problems. These sequences cannot be explained in terms of age, general cognitive development or general linguistic development. It is argued that gone encodes a concept related to the concepts that underlie success on invisible displacement tasks, and that success/failure words encode concepts related to the concepts that underlie the development of insight. Children seem to acquire words that encode concepts they have just developed or are in the process of developing. These results suggest that there are strong and specific links between the acquisition of particular types of meanings and particular cognitive achievements. Several alternative explanations for these early links between semantic and conceptual development are proposed.

Although higher pitch has been described as a universal feature of babytalk (BT) registers worldwide, analysis of a sample of three Quiche Mayan-speaking mothers addressing their infant children indicated that their BT register does not utilize this feature. Quiche mothers either make no pitch distinction in speech to young children, or actually lower pitch slightly in comparison with their Adult–Adult interaction style. A comparison group of American mothers raised pitch 35–70 Hz when addressing infants of the same age and language maturity. We posit that pitch-raising strategies may be sociolinguistically determined and may serve different functions across languages.

Previous studies have reported systematic individual differences among children in their noun and pronoun use. This study examined mothers' use of nouns and pronouns and their references to objects and persons as environmental variables which might relate to children's nominal preferences. Mothers' speech to children classified as referential or expressive in speech style (Nelson 1973) at low and high MLU levels (Nelson 1975) was analysed, and differences relating to children's style and MLU were reported. Results showed no relationship between mothers' use of nouns or pronouns and children's speech style, but did show that mothers' references to objects and persons were related to children's style. These findings are the strongest evidence to date that environmental factors contribute to stylistic differences in language acquisition, and also give support to Nelson's (1973) hypothesis that the communicative functions of language are an important factor in referential and expressive speech styles.

A cross-sectional and a longitudinal study of 2-year-old children was performed to investigate the developmental relationship between understanding differences in spatial point of view and correct comprehension and production of I/you pronouns. In Study I only those children who demonstrated understanding that individuals' points of view can differ had begun to master speaker's point of view, as shown by correct use of some of the pronouns. Only children with complete understanding of points of view were able to use all I/you pronouns without errors. In Study 11 no child used the set of I/you pronouns without errors until s/he had complete understanding of points of view. Across children, a given pronoun tended not to be free of errors until the child understood that points of view can differ. Results are interpreted to support the hypothesis that understanding spatial points of view is a cognitive prerequisite to understanding speaker's point of view, which governs the pragmatics of 11 you pronouns.

Patterns of vowel articulation in conversational speech to an adult and to child listeners were analysed in the speech of nine mothers. Formant frequency analysis of vowels embedded in 2,406 words found in varying syntactic environments and uttered by women to pre-verbal, holophrastic and more advanced child listeners (MLUs 2·5–4·0) revealed an emerging pattern of content word clarification, as measured by wider dispersion and decreased overlap between vowel phoneme categories in formant characteristics. Additionally, function word clarification was noted in speech to the oldest children. Vowel production appears to be modulated by child–addressee language ability. Earlier studies suggesting a lack of phonetic clarification in mother–child speech may have investigated speech to children too mature to elicit maternal clarification behaviours.

This study attempts to determine whether subject–auxiliary inversion occurs in yes–no questions before wh-questions and whether non-inversion errors (when daddy will come home?) are a characteristic feature of the acquisition of wh-questions. The data consist of the yes–no and wh-questions of 18 children, aged 2;5 to 3;0 with an mlu range of 2.66–4.26. Findings do not support previous claims that inversion is acquired in yes–no questions before wh-questions. Rather, a significant number of children were found to use an optional inversion rule in both question types. This fact appears to account for the finding that non-inversion errors are a characteristic feature of the acquisition of wh-questions.

An acting-out task and two modified forms of the token-assignment task described by Braine & Wells (1978) were used to test the ability of 72 children aged 3;0–4;6 to identify the actor in an event; in one token-assignment task the children were required to respond after watching silent enactments of transitive events, and in the other the children heard verbal descriptions of similar events. Comparison of individual response patterns across the tasks revealed that whereas 62 of the 72 children could identify the actor in the non-verbal task, 19 of them subsequently failed to perform as well when they had to base their judgement on active sentences in the verbal task; and of the 44 who responded accurately in the verbal token-assignment task only 34 responded consistently correctly when required to act out those sentences. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for the development of syntactic comprehension.

The first word-formation devices children should learn, we proposed, are the most productive ones, that is, those that have the fewest structural constraints on their use and that appear most frequently in the formation of new words. Four- and five-year-old children who were asked to recall novel words with English agentive suffixes recalled the most productive suffix (-er) well and its less productive companions (-ist and -ian) very poorly. Other children who were asked to recall as agentive suffixes the non-agentive -ly (about equal in frequency to -er) together with -ist and -ian, did poorly on all three. They also substituted agentive suffixes (including -er) for the non-agentive -ly, with greater reliance on more productive forms. These data, together with previous observations, support the hypothesis that productivity affects the order in which children master word-formation devices.

When repeating spoken sentences, children who are good readers tend to be more accurate than poor readers because they are able to make more effective use of phonetic representation in the service of working memory (Mann, Liberman & Shankweiler 1980). This study of good and poor readers in the third grade has assessed both the repetition and comprehension of relative-clause sentences to explore more fully the association between early reading ability, spoken sentence processing and use of phonetic representation. It was found that the poor readers did less well than the good readers on sentence comprehension as well as on sentence repetition, and that their comprehension errors reflected a greater reliance on two sentence-processing strategies favoured by young children: the minimum-distance principle and conjoined-clause analysis. In general, the pattern of results is consonant with a view that difficulties with phonetic representation could underlie the inferior sentence comprehension of poor beginning readers. The finding that these children place greater reliance on immature processing strategies raises the further possibility that the tempo of their syntactic development may be slower than that of good readers.

Although the role of visual perception is central to many theories of language development, researchers have disagreed sharply on the effects of blindness on the acquisition process: some claim major differences between blind and sighted children; others find great similarities. With audio-and video-recorded longitudinal data from six children (with varying degrees of vision) aged 0; 9–3; 4, we show that there ARE basic differences in early language, which appear to reflect differences in cognitive development. We focus here on early lexical acquisition and on verbal role-play, demonstrating how previous analyses have failed to observe aspects of the blind child's language system because language was considered out of the context of use. While a comparison of early vocabularies does suggest surface similarities, we found that when sighted peers are actively forming hypotheses about word meanings, totally blind children are acquiring largely unanalysed ‘labels’. They are slow to extend words and rarely overextended any. Similarly, although verbal role-play appears early, attempts to incorporate this kind of language into conversations with others reveal clear problems with reversibility – specifically, the ability to understand the role of shifting perspectives in determining word meaning. Examination of language in context suggests that blind children have difficulties in just those areas of language acquisition where visual information can provide input about the world and be a stimulus for forming hypotheses about pertinent aspects of the linguistic system.

The verbal responses of 22 second graders, 24 fourth graders and 22 sixth graders to ambiguous and clear messages were recorded. Children's referential choices were analysed. After the ambiguous messages, children (from the age of seven years) chose preferentially a referent with only the feature described in the message rather than a referent with this feature plus another one. The results support the Jackson & Jacobs' hypothesis (1982) that children use an interpretative strategy based on a presupposition about the speaker's co-operation. But the results may also support a hypothesis that children use an information-processing rule not necessarily related to a presupposition about the speaker's co-operation.

I will summarize here some evidence in support of the hypothesis that the child's early combinations of two-word relations may be described simply as processes of concatenation and deletion. This implies that the utterances so produced will represent flat constructions as opposed to hierarchical ones.