Although questions vary considerably with respect to the responses appropriate to them and the motivations intrinsic to them, little attention has yet been given to the potential effects of these factors on the power of questions to perform turn-allocating and response-eliciting functions. The present study attempts to clarify how such variables as motivation, constraint, difficulty and function may affect the child's responsiveness to mother questions. Results suggest that functionally defined question types are differentiable not only by their relative power to elicit a response from the child, but also by the manner in which they are presented. Implications of these results in the context of mother–child conversation and its effects are considered.

The study was designed to investigate 2-month-old infant preferential attention to a feature found to be characteristic of mothers' speech to their infants. A modified infant-control auditory preference paradigm was employed to assess infants' differential attention to synthetically generated and naturally produced rising and falling intonation contours. Analysis of these data revealed that the infants attended more to the rising naturally produced intonation contour. A reverse pattern of greater attention to the falling contour was found with the synthetically generated stimuli. In addition, inspection of the results permitted the conclusion that the infant-control preference paradigm was a viable method for assessing the 2-month-old infant's preferential attention to auditory stimuli. The results are discussed in terms of their relevance to the study of the infant's developing language reception abilities.

Sensitivity to differences in lexical stress pattern was examined in 4- and 5-year-old monolingual French-, German- and Swedish-speaking children. For most stimulus discriminations, the 5-year-olds outperformed their 4-year-old comparison groups. For a discrimination involving a trisyllabic distinction not found in French, however, the French 5-year-olds performed worse than their 4-year-old compatriots, suggesting that the older children had ‘learned’ not to hear the trisyllabic distinction. In follow-up testing of the French 4-year-olds six months later, half of them showed a similar decrease in performance specific to the trisyllabic stimuli. These data support an ‘attunement’ theory of language acquisition, in which potentially relevant abilities that are already partially or fully developed at birth may become attenuated or completely lost if they are inappropriate or irrelevant for the child's language.

The present paper investigates a strategy for language acquisition adopted by one child, and the usefulness of book-reading in supporting that strategy. Conversations between this child and his mother around picture-book reading were recorded and recurrent discussions of the same picture were analysed. A coding scheme was devised which identified each speaker's contribution to the exchange of information about a particular picture. By examining recurrent picture discussions, it was possible to trace the child's acquisition of the linguistic means for talking about a given picture. It was found that specific lexical items and constructions used to talk about a picture frequently recurred in subsequent discussions, and that the child learned many of these same items and constructions. Furthermore, he was most likely to acquire what he had heard his mother say about a picture if he had repeated it in an earlier discussion. The usefulness of routines for such situation-specific learning and the implications of the situation-specific approach for future investigations of input language are discussed.

Mothers' speech in an identification task was examined for ten mother–child pairs in which the child's age varied from 1; 9 to 4; 9. Stimuli were used from three domains, animals, clothes and furniture. These varied in familiarity, centrality (goodness of exemplar) and number of items. Basic-level category terms were found to be the most frequently used labels. Superordinate category terms were elicited by (a) an unfamiliar animal and (b) groups of items from the same domain. Information on category relations was provided in several ways: alternative labels, multiple labels and explicit statements of inclusion. Competencies required to learn the correct referent for category terms and differences among superordinate categories are discussed.

The precise function of imitation in children's speech is still debated. Two hypotheses have been offered that focus on either the progressive nature of imitation to aid in the language acquisition process or the social, conversational role played by imitation in discourse. Support for these positions was sought in the imitations within the speech of a single child at ages 2; 8 and 3; 0. Evidence is presented for both roles of imitation in language acquisition. First, imitation aids in limiting the complexity (MLU) of the language environment. The effects of imitation in this role are compared and contrasted to the effects of the child's productions of what? Also, forms may appear in imitation prior to their appearance in spontaneous speech. A model is proposed in which imitation and what?-responses are overlapping phases of language acquisition which occur prior to spontaneous production of a given form.

This study explores factors other than the concept of comparison which influence the learning of specific comparative adjective forms, namely, (a) the nature of the perceptual input, and (b) the nature of the event. Thirty subjects, age 4; 5 to 7; 9, were asked to describe objects reflecting various attribute differences in both multiple-object comparison and single-object, dynamic-change tasks. Children used comparative adjectives to talk about dynamic changes prior to static comparisons, and attributes based on visual or tactile input were easier than those based on both. These results are interpreted as indicating that perceptual cue redundancy and heterogeneity affects the learning of attribute dimensions, and that children first use the -er suffix in a non-comparative sense.

The use of linguistic and extralinguistic information in identifying conversational topics was studied in 3- and 5-year-old children. Pictures portraying an actor–action–object relation were used to guide conversations. Both active pictures, emphasizing an action relating actor and object via postural cues, and static pictures, which did not, were used. Linguistic topics were implied by prefacing each picture with comments topicalizing actor, action or object. In neutral control groups no topic was implied and, in an explicit control group of 3-year-Olds the actor's action on the object was directly topicalized. While implicit topic definition was sufficient for 5-year-olds' production of contingent replies, explicit definition of a topic was necessary to evoke a similar pattern of replies from 3-year-olds. These findings are discussed in terms of different modes of topic definition and their order of acquisition.

Some conjunctions simultaneously convey speakers' presuppositions about the validity of propositions uttered and assertions of particular interclausal relations. Because conveys belief, if + indicative, uncertainty and if + subjunctive, disbelief. While all three conjuctions assert positive entailment, unless, which like if + indicative presupposes uncertainty, asserts negative entailment or denial. The relationship between pragmatic knowledge and reasoning was explored by asking 12 males and 12 females at each of three ages (12, 15, adult) to solve written syllogisms containing the four conjunctions and evaluate single sentences for their pragmatic content. In the pragmatic task, belief was easier to detect than uncertainty or disbelief. Positive entailment was easier than negative entailment. Only entailment influenced syllogistic reasoning with unless harder than the positively entailed conjunctions. At each age linguistic comprehension of negative entailment was related to understanding valid implications in unless syllogisms. The relation between comprehension of pragmatic uncertainty and detection of uncertain conclusions in reasoning increased with age.