Recent years have witnessed a cognitivist reaction against previous views of language learning. It had been held that mere exposure to language is a sufficient condition for language acquisition, whether by hypothesis testing (Katz 1966) or through passive learning (Braine 1971). Symptomatic of this approach were experiments investigating the learning of grammar in which subjects were taught artificial miniature languages without meaning, either through making guesses and receiving feedback from the experimenter (e.g. Hunt 1965) or passively, just by listening (Braine 1971). Although no such claim was explicitly made, language learning was actually treated as if it occurred independently of cognitive development. This one-sided approach has since been corrected by the cognitivists as represented in particular by the Geneva school (Sinclair 1971), who stress the importance of general cognitive development in language acquisition. Experiments with artificial languages bear the imprint of this approach and now involve semantic referents of the linguistic symbols (e.g. Moeser & Bregman 1972, 1973).

Fundamental frequency (F0) characteristics of non-distress vocalizations produced by four infants during the first twenty-four weeks of life were examined. This study constitutes the beginning of a longitudinal investigation of phonological development displayed by these children from birth to two years. Vocalization samples were obtained from home and laboratory recordings. Period-by-period F0 melody plots and descriptive statistics for each utterance were derived from computer analysis. Mean F0 centred around 335 Hz, with little variation evidenced when data were pooled. Duration, within-utterance range and variability did show developmental change. Individual F0 fluctuations deviating from the mean were felt to be associated with the infant's state, activity levels, and changing vocal repertoire. Sources of variation among studies of infant F0 characteristics appear to be related to differences in sampling and measurement techniques.

Until now, although there has been research on the acquisition of intonation and stress, there has been no systematic study of the acquisition of lexical tone. Based on data collected during eight months of field work with 17 children of Mandarin-speaking families in Taipei, we have found that (1) tone acquisition is accomplished within a relatively short period of time; (2) mastery of tones occurs well in advance of mastery of seg-mentals; (3) the Mandarin high-level and falling tones are acquired before the rising and dipping tones; (4) the rising and dipping tones are substituted for each other throughout the tone acquisition process; (5) unstressed syllables are treated as if they were stressed, the tone assigned to them being an approximation of the phonetically conditioned pitch which they carry; (6) the tone sandhi phenomena associated with the dipping tone in Mandarin are acquired with very little error as soon as propositional utterances begin to be created. Explanations for these facts can be given in terms of the relative ease of learning to control glottal pitch as opposed to articulatory mechanisms, the relative difficulty of rising pitch, and the relative salience of tone in Mandarin.

The comprehension ability of 36 children at three stages of telegraphic speech (mean length of utterance 1·45, 2·03, and 2·76 morphemes) was assessed using active behavioural responses to declarative and imperative sentences. Both forms were varied in syntactic and semantic complexity. The responses were scored in terms of objects used by the child, whether or not the child's actions were appropriate, and whether or not appropriate verbalization accompanied the actions. A significant increase in verbal and behavioural appropriateness with age was found for both imperative and declarative forms. Consistent with Shipley, Smith & Gleitman's (1969) results, advanced telegraphic speakers responded most often to adult stimulus forms. However, contrary to Shipley et al.'s findings, all children, even the earliest telegraphic speakers, were more accurate in responding to adult forms than to child forms, suggesting that ability to comprehend adult linguistic forms is present even at the earliest stages of telegraphic speech. The findings imply that re-evaluation of the development of comprehension ability in telegraphic speakers is necessary.

This study examined children's production and comprehension of questions, with the aim of discovering possible patterns in question acquisition. For the production study, questions were collected from 22 children aged 2; 0–3; 11. The data show a high frequency of yes-no, what, and where questions by age 2; 0. Why and how questions were infrequent but they increased with age. Who and when questions were rarely asked by children of any age. From the frequency data a rough chronological order of acquisition was inferred: what, where, why, how, when. In the comprehension study 100 children were tested, aged 3; 0–5; 5. The test controlled syntax and vocabulary and varied specific wh- question-words. The frequency of correct answers increased with the age of the children. When children made mistakes, their answers were not random but appeared to be following certain question-answering strategies. These included attention to semantic features of verbs and especially the placement of verbs in the sentence.

In a replication and extension of a study on the pronoun it by Chipman & de Dardel, 61 children aged 3; 1–5; 2 were asked to carry out instructions of the form ‘There is playdough on the table. Give it to me’. They were also asked ‘Give me some’, and ‘Give me the playdough’. The results indicate that children do observe the distinction between definite and indefinite pronouns as it applies to quantity, from the youngest age studied. It is also argued that to the extent that children fail to fully comprehend the implications of using the definite pronoun, their failure applies to definite reference in general, and not the pronoun in particular.

The utterance The man fell down because he slipped on a banana peel is a verbal statement in which causation is stated directly, and the major events are not reported in the perceptual order of occurrence. Surprisingly, in retelling 20 ‘stories’, 23 nursery-school children often refused to produce sentences in which causation was stated directly, but readily retold causationimplied utterances; performance was worst for unrelated (control) stories. Moreover, backward temporal order hurt performance only when causation was stated directly. Except for this latter condition, memory was best for the first half of the stories regardless of the temporal arrangement of the clauses. Finally, the majority of the story events were reproduced in the linguistic order in which they had been originally presented.

Pre-school children were required to act out a series of two-event sequences conjoined by either before or after. The sentences to be acted out consisted of either a meaningfully or an arbitrarily ordered sequence of events. Performance was markedly superior for meaningfully ordered sequences. It is suggested that the meanings of before and after must be acquired in situations which provide contextual support, and only then can be applied in situations which do not provide such support.

Coordinate conjunction was evaluated in early child language with regard to its structural properties. In a series of four studies, 60 two- and three-year-olds grouped by MLU were studied in an elicited imitation task where in the linguistic form of sentences was varied according to conjunction structure (whether sentential or phrasal) and according to pattern of redundancy deletion in conjunction reduction (whether forward or backward in directionality). Both factors were found to affect children's imitation. The results suggested specific constraints on the structure of coordination in child language.

The ability to define words by means of other words, which forms a part of many standardized tests, must be learned by a child. The nature of the ‘definitional task’ and the development of language responses (from children 4; 5 to 7; 5) are discussed in terms of a linguistic analysis of the definitional form and its semantic relations. Progress in definitional strategies by children moves along two continua: conceptually from the individually experiential to the socially shared; and syntactically from actual predicates through hypothetical predicates to adult definitional sentence frames. Implications include novel elicitation techniques, psycholinguistically informed evaluation of direction and scoring measures of some common standardized verbal tests, and better understanding of the range of normal development on one specific language task.