The possibility that early linguistic experience affects infant speech perception was investigated in a cross-linguistic study with naturally produced speech stimuli. Using the Visually Reinforced Infant Speech Discrimination paradigm, three contrasts were presented to Spanish-and English-learning infants 6–8 months of age. Both groups of infants showed statistically significant discrimination of two contrasts, English and Czech. Only the Spanish-learning infants provided evidence of discrimination of the Spanish contrast. The groups discriminated the English contrast at similarly high levels, but the Spanish-learning infants showed significantly higher performance than the English on both the Spanish and the Czech contrast. The results indicate that early experience does affect early discrimination, and further (since the stimuli were natural) that the effect may be of practical consequence in language learning.

Many early words encode aspects of plans, that is, actions performed in order to bring about events. Gone and down encode the fact that an action is intended to bring about a certain type of event. There and oh dear encode the success or failure of plans, no encodes the rejection of a plan. More encodes the repetition of a plan. It is argued that the concepts encoded by gone and down are like the concepts that underlie trial- and-error problem-solving and are developed after 12 months. The more abstract concepts encoded by there, oh dear, no and more are associated with the development of insight after 18 months. These early words are acquired because they are relevant to the child's cognitive problems.

The influence of phonological selection and avoidance upon early lexical acquisition was examined within an experimental paradigm. During 10 bi-weekly experimental sessions, 12 children (1;0.21 to 1;3.15 at the outset) were presented with 16 contrived lexical concepts, each consisting of a nonsense word and four unfamiliar referents. For each child, eight words involved phonological characteristics which had been evidenced in production (in) and eight had characteristics which had not been evidenced in production or selection (out), in words were produced imitatively and non-imitatively in greater numbers and in earlier sessions than OUT words, providing evidence for the influence of selection and avoidance. The degree of phonetic accuracy of these two types of productions did not differ. These findings are discussed in terms of a proposal concerning early phonological representation and acquisition.

Previous research has suggested that the syntactic and semantic characteristics of mother speech are determined by the underlying intention of mothers to control (Newport 1977) or to converse with (Snow 1977) the child. The present study attempts to delineate the structure among functionally categorized mother conversational behaviours, especially those which might reflect the mother's intention to control or converse with her child. The utterances of II mothers with their children (aged 2; 5–3; 0) were categorized according to their illocutionary force or function. Conversational parameters, such as topic change rate and talkativeness, were also measured. Intercorrelations among all these mother variables showed a polarized pattern, reflecting two predominant mother intentions for conversational interaction: the control of the child's physical actions, and the elicitation of his conversational participation. Implications of the findings, especially those indicating the incompatibility of controlling and conversation-eliciting intentions, are discussed.

An investigation into the pronoun distribution of a pronoun-reversing child reveals inconsistencies both within production and between production and comprehension. This distribution is compatible with some analyses of normal pronoun development and pronoun reversal which have attributed non-adult person distinctions to the child. However, the data are also compatible with a quite distinct hypothesis which postulates that the child's pronouns are plurifunctional: the unreversed pronouns encode full adult distinctions, and are independent of the reversed pronouns, which function to shift perspective. The evaluation of these hypotheses and the questions they raise for normal and pathological pronoun development are discussed.

The present paper is concerned with establishing the relative difficulty involved in the acquisition of the temporal conjunctions before and after. It tries to control the influence on performance of the following variables: contextual support within a sentence (logically/arbitrarily ordered sequences), order of mention, syntactic complexity, task requirement variables, and memory load. In addition, experiments intended to throw light on the cognitive mechanisms underlying an understanding of these conjuctions are described. The concept of time is supposed to be spatial in origin. An understanding of relative time is dependent on ability to decentre and coordinate. Finally, it is suggested that reversible thinking (in a Piagetian sense) is involved in the process of making inverse sentence order agree with event order.

Given the nature of Hebrew as a highly synthetic language with rich bound morphology, an attempt was made to establish a measure corresponding to the MLU for a language such as English. The method of calculating MPU (morpheme-per-utterance) which is described here was tried out on 38 Hebrew-speaking children aged 2;0 to 3;0, and measured for internal consistency against different types of elicitation procedures, and for validity by comparison with the subjects' performance on a specially-devised measure of syntactic–semantic development. The results clearly indicate that the MPU is a useful developmental index of the linguistic proficiency of two- to three-year-old Hebrew speakers. Implications of this finding for intra-linguistic and cross-linguistic evaluation are then discussed.

This study of children's conjunction reduction contrasted the syntactic view of forward and backward deletion of base structure elements with the idea that pragmatic factors of situational redundancy and perceptual grouping account for conjunction reduction. Ninety-four children described an action sequence (putting differently coloured beads into a cup) so that a listener positioned behind a screen could repeat them. Half the children communicated as the action was being carried out (SIMULTANEOUS condition), mitigating against perceptual grouping of beads in the cup. Half communicated after the action was completed (POST condition), permitting perceptual grouping. Backward deletion was more frequent in the post than in the simultaneous condition. Also, the overall high frequency of forward deletion reflected encoding of novelty and omission of repetitive elements. These results suggest syntax is pragmatically motivated.

The present study examines changes with age in interrogative sequences among Dutch-speaking children. Thirty-eight male and female pairs of children were videotaped in a play situation; eight pairs of pre-schoolers and ten pairs of 7-, 9- and 11-year-old schoolchildren, with an equal number of pairs of boys and pairs of girls at each age level. An interrogative sequence consists of: question–listener reaction–confirmation of that reaction. Questions were analysed according to function, content and form, and listener reaction according to how appropriate it was. The main results are: (1) changes with age occur in the use and form but not in the content of questions; (2) a relation exists between the function, content and form of a question and the listener's reaction; (3) listeners frequently do not answer questions (this tendency is stronger within the two younger age groups than within the two older ones); (4) answers are frequently not confirmed.

Some subordinating conjunctions reveal whether speakers believe the propositions the conjunctions connect and how speakers believe propositions are connected. Because and although express belief; if + indicative and unless uncertainty, and if + subjunctive, disbelief. Because, if + indicative and if + subjunctive express a positive entailment relation between clauses while although and unless express negative entailment. To validate this analysis a comprehension task was administered to 96 subjects divided among 9-, 11- and 19-year-olds. Nine-year-olds understood although and because while adults also comprehended unless and if + indicative. Generally the more positive beliefs the conjunction embodied, the easier its comprehension. The order of difficulty was because, although, if + indicative, unless, and if + subjunctive. Older subjects more often confused if + subjunctive with if + indicative. Understanding of the uncertainty conveyed by if + indicative and unless was linked to performance on a task of detecting uncertain outcomes.

The game of ‘talking backward’, invented independently by two boys aged 8; 10 and 9; 11, is studied with reference to the role of speech play in linguistic, cognitive, and social development. Case reports from 27 adult backward talkers suggest a lower limit of about 7 years for the onset of this ability. The backward speech of the two children illustrates how either phonology or orthography can be used as a basis for backward speech, and demonstrates the boys' knowledge of phonemic units and letter-to-sound correspondences. Talking backward belongs to a larger class of ‘secret’ language games that may be cognitively and pragmatically well suited to children of this age.

Fourth-, eighth-, twelfth-graders and expert adults each wrote persuasive messages to three audiences arrayed along a dimension of intimacy to writer. Measures of social cognitive ability were also obtained. Scripts were analysed for (1) fluency, (2) subordination, (3) clause length, (4) logical adverbial clauses, and (5) conjunctions of conclusion. In addition to general developmental trends, results indicated effects of audience adaptation and of mediation of social cognitive ability. Findings support the view that evidence of later language development must be interpreted in light of communicative demands of tasks and subjects' rhetorical skills.