This paper outlines functionally motivated quantifiable criteria for characterizing different facets of discourse – global-level principles, categories of referential content, clause-linking complex syntax, local linguistic expression and overall discourse stance – in relation to the variables of development, genre and modality. Concern is with later, school-age language development, in the conviction that the long developmental route of language acquisition can profitably be examined in the context of extended discourse. Findings are reviewed from a cross-linguistic project that elicited narrative and expository texts in both speech and writing at four age groups: (9–10 years, 12–13, 16–17 and adults). Clear developmental patterns emerge from middle childhood to adulthood, with significant shifts in adolescence; global-level text organization is mastered earlier in narratives than in expository essays, but the latter promote more advanced use of local-level lexicon and syntax; and spoken texts are more spread out than their denser written counterparts in clause-linkage, referential content and lexical usage. These and other findings are discussed in terms of the growth and reorganization of knowledge about types of discourse and text-embedded language use.

The acquisition of reference involves both morphosyntax and pragmatics. This study investigates whether Dutch, English and French two- to three-year-old children differentiate in their use of determiners between non-specific/specific reference, newness/givenness in discourse and mutual/no mutual knowledge between interlocutors. A brief analysis of the input shows a clear association between form and function, although there are some language differences in this respect. As soon as determiner use can be statistically analyzed, the children show a relatively adult-like pattern of association for the distinctions of non-specific/specific and newness/givenness. The distinction between mutual/no mutual knowledge appears later. Reference involving no mutual knowledge is scarcely evidenced in the input and barely used by the children at this age. The development of associations is clearly related to the rate of determiner development, the French being quickest, then the English, then the Dutch.

In order to examine whether children adjust their phonetic speech categories, children of two age groups, five-year-olds and eight-year-olds, were exposed to a video of a face saying /aba/ or /ada/ accompanied by an auditory ambiguous speech sound halfway between /b/ and /d/. The effect of exposure to these audiovisual stimuli was measured on subsequently delivered auditory-only speech identification trials. Results were compared to a control condition in which the audiovisual exposure stimuli contained non-ambiguous and congruent sounds /aba/ or /ada/. The older children learned to categorize the initially ambiguous speech sound in accord with the previously seen lip-read information (i.e. recalibration), but this was not the case for the younger age group. Moreover, all children displayed a tendency to report the stimulus that they were exposed to during the exposure phase. Methodological improvements for adjusting such a response bias are discussed.

Oral language skills in the preschool years are predictive of children's later reading success and literacy acquisition, and among these language skills, vocabulary and narrative ability play important roles. Children from low socioeconomic families face risks to their language development and because of threats to these skills it is important to identify factors that promote their development among high-risk groups. This preliminary study explored two potential factors that may be related to language skills in 56 low SES mother–child dyads (children aged 2 ; 8–4 ; 10), namely child temperament and parenting stress. Results showed that child temperament and parenting stress were related to children's oral language skills. Child temperament characteristics that would likely aid social interaction were related to narrative ability and children rated high on emotionality had poorer receptive vocabulary skills. Parenting stress was related to children's receptive and expressive vocabulary skills. Results are interpreted in terms of the possible mediating role of parent–child interactions in children's oral language skill development, and future directions for family intervention are discussed.

Evidentials are grammatical source-of-knowledge markers. In Bulgarian they provide information about authorship – whether the speaker has personally acquired the information or not – and modality – whether perceptual or cognitive mechanisms were involved in the information's generation. In two experiments, Bulgarian kindergarteners and third-graders (ages 6 and 9, N=96) had to decide which one of two utterances containing different evidentials to believe. Experiment 1 showed that children draw on modality information in their decisions: Third-graders favored perceptual over cognitive and kindergartners cognitive over perceptual sources. Experiment 2 showed that third-graders can also draw on the authorship information carried by evidentials: they favored first- over second-hand information. The discussion focuses on understanding the development of children's use of evidentials.

The current study examines the syntactic and prosodic characteristics of the maternal speech to two infants between six and ten months. Consistent with previous work, we find infant-directed speech to be characterized by generally short utterances, isolated words and phrases, and large numbers of questions, but longer utterances are also found. Prosodic information provides cues to grammatical units not only at utterance boundaries, but also at utterance-internal clause boundaries. Subject–verb phrase boundaries in questions also show reliable prosodic cues, although those of declaratives do not. Prosodic information may thus play an important role in providing preverbal infants with information about the grammatically relevant word groupings. Furthermore, questions may play an important role in infants' discovery of verb phrases in English.

Two studies test the hypotheses that individual differences in phonological memory among children younger than two years can be assessed using a non-word repetition task (NWR) and that these differences are related to the children's rates of vocabulary development. NWR accuracy, real word repetition accuracy and productive vocabulary were assessed in 15 children between 1 ; 9 and 2 ; 0 in Study 1 and in 21 children between 1 ; 8 and 2 ; 0 in Study 2. In both studies, NWR accuracy was significantly related to vocabulary percentile and, furthermore, uniquely accounted for a substantial portion of the variance in vocabulary when real word repetition accuracy was held constant. The findings establish NWR as a valid measure of phonological memory in very young children, and they open the door for further studies of the role of phonological memory in early word learning.