Fourteen full-term, healthy, three-month-old infants were observed during a total of 15 minutes spontaneous face-to-face interaction with their mothers. Facial and manual actions, gaze direction and vocalizations were coded. The infants' cooing vocalizations were categorized into syllabic and vocalic sounds. Index-finger extension occurred frequently in sequence with syllabic sounds, which are speech-like vocalizations, but rarely occurred in sequence with vocalic sounds. No other categories of nonvocal behaviours showed such a relationship. In a subsequent experiment, the infants experienced either conversational turn-taking or random responsiveness from their mothers. In the turn-taking condition, the infants produced a higher ratio of syllabic to vocalic sounds, and a higher frequency of index-finger extension. These results suggest a strong connection between speech and the pointing gesture long before the infant can actually talk.

This study explored the development of verbal behaviours of infants during two mother–infant games. Twenty-five infants were videotaped as they played peek-a-boo and ball with their mothers at 0;6, 0;9, 1;0, 1;3, 1;6, and 2;0. The frequencies of eight categories of vocal/verbal behaviours were analysed as they evolved over time in both games. Despite differences in the structure and level of difficulty of peek-a-boo and ball, the development of these behaviours proved to be similar in the two games. One category, PRIMITIVE VOCALIZATIONS, which did not change in frequency over time, was seen to have a pragmatic rather than a linguistic function. Another category, PRELEXICAL COMMENT, demonstrated an early capacity for conveying topic and comment together in the form of speech sounds combined with an attentiongetting gesture well before the emergence of multiple-word utterances. The vocal behaviours produced during games were compared with the results of language tests administered during the experimental sessions. Strong correlations were found between the results of these two measures of language. The predictive nature of vocal behaviours during games is discussed.

The present study examines adult and child word-initial voice onset time productions in English and Hindi (10 adults and 20 children in each language) to determine the age of acquisition of the phonemic voice contrast. Cross-linguistic differences in patterns of acquisition were found, but these need not be traced to the different phonological Systems per se. An examination of the data indicates that the best predictor of age of voice contrast acquisition across languages is one which rests on the actual acoustic differences between members of phonologically contrastive pairs. In general it was found that the larger the post-release voice onset time differences between pair members in the adult model, the earlier the contrast is reliably produced by child language learners.

English-speaking children (N = 91) who were attending French schools (bilingual group) were given a battery of phonological awareness tests in kindergarten and in grade 1. At the time of kindergarten testing the mean age of the children was 5:9. Their performance was compared to age-matched English-speaking children (N = 72) attending English schools (monolingual group). The bilingual children showed heightened levels of phonological awareness skills in kindergarten in the area of onset-rime awareness. By grade 1, the pattern of group differences was more complex. The monolingual and bilingual children performed similarly on onset-rime segmentation tasks. The monolingual children had higher phoneme awareness scores than their French-schooled peers; this result is interpreted to reflect the role of literacy instruction on phoneme awareness development. In comparison, the bilingual children had higher syllable segmentation scores than their monolingual peers. This result is interpreted to reflect the role of second language input on phonological awareness.

In the present longitudinal study, we examined changes in parental labelling and infants' categorization skills as potential predictors of vocabulary composition, the age of the naming explosion, and the acquisition of subordinate labels. Sixteen French- and English-speaking parent–child dyads were videotaped during a 2O-minute free-play session every month beginning when the child was 1;0 and ending at 2;0. The children received object-manipulation tasks every three months and their vocabulary growth was recorded. Parental labelling practices were assessed monthly using a picture-book reading task. Both parental labelling and children's categorization skills predicted the content of children's lexicon, with children with more names in their vocabulary having better categorization skills. Furthermore, the naming explosion was found to coincide with improvement of categorization skills. These findings suggest that the influence of each factor varies as a function of the stage and aspect of lexical development considered.

This study tests the widely-cited claim from Volterra & Taeschner (1978), which is reinforced by Clark's Principle Of Contrast (1987), that young simultaneous bilingual children reject cross-language synonyms in their earliest lexicons. The rejection of translation equivalents is taken by Volterra & Taeschner as support for the idea that the bilingual child possesses a single-language system which includes elements from both languages. We examine first the accuracy of the empirical claim and then its adequacy as support for the argument that bilingual children do not have independent lexical systems in each language. The vocabularies of 27 developing bilinguals were recorded at varying intervals between ages 0;8 and 2;6, using the MacArthur GDI, a standardized parent report form in English and Spanish. The two single-language vocabularies of each bilingual child were compared to determine how many pairs of translation equivalents (TEs) were reported for each child at different stages of development. TEs were observed for all children but one, with an average of 30% of all words coded in the two languages, both at early stages (in vocabularies of 2–12 words) and later (up to 500 words). Thus, Volterra & Taeschner's empirical claim was not upheld. Further, the number of TEs in the bilinguals' two lexicons was shown to be similar to the number of lexical items which co-occurred in the monolingual lexicons of two different children, as observed in 34 random pairings for between-child comparisons. It remains to be shown, therefore, that the bilinguals' lexicons are not composed of two independent systems at a very early age. Furthermore, the results appear to rule out the operation of a strong principle of contrast across languages in early bilingualism.

Lexical gaps in vocabulary development have been acknowledged as a reason for language mixing in young bilingual children. In spite of this, most studies do not take into account whether young bilinguals have the lexical resources to make a choice between their two languages. Inferences are nevertheless still being made about whether or not young bilinguals differentiate between their two languages based on language choice. It is widely believed, however, that young bilinguals do not have the resources to make lexical choices at a pre-syntactic stage of development before age two. A bilingual case study of an infant acquiring Spanish and English from birth to age 1;10 is used to address this issue. Daily diary records and weekly video recordings in the two language contexts are used to construct the child's lexicon and to establish that translation equivalents that make possible language choice are available from the beginning of speech. The results are used to discuss the importance of translation equivalents in the bilingual lexicon for viable interpretations of language choice.

Two studies are described which investigate preschool children's sensitivity to relative clauses as barriers to the movement of wh-questions. The children were presented with short stories followed by questions in which the wh-word had two possible sites of interpretation, the ungrammatical option being inside a relative clause. A cross-sectional study with 23 children aged 3;1 to 6;1, and a longitudinal study over the course of one year with 12 children aged 3;1 to 4;1 at the start, found young children refused to extract wh-questions from the ungrammatical site inside a relative clause. This confirms other findings that children's early grammars are sensitive to universal constraints on movement. In addition, the children differentiated between wh-complements and relative clauses in their tendency to mistakenly answer the medial wh-complementizer but not the wh-relative pronoun. Explanations for the latter are framed in terms of children's initial assumptions about the attachment of complements.

The study investigated the effects of using props to illustrate the meaning of sentences in a syntactic awareness task in which subjects were required to correct ungrammatical sentences. Forty preschool children (aged 4;11 to 5;11) were asked to correct 20 sentences, 10 of which were illustrated using props, and 10 of which were not. Children scored significantly higher in the props condition though the proportion of meaning-changing errors to total errors was not significantly lower in this condition. It is argued that the use of props, by providing contextual support, reduces the processing capacity required to complete the task.

In past research, the form of Japanese children's personal narratives was found to be distinctly different from that of English-speaking children. Despite follow-up questions that encouraged them to talk about one personal narrative at length, Japanese children spoke succinctly about collections of experiences rather than elaborating on any one experience in particular (Minami & McCabe, 1991). Conversations between mothers and children in the two cultures were examined in order partly to account for the way in which cultural narrative style is transmitted to children. Comparison of mothers from the two cultures yielded the following salient contrasts: (1) In comparison to the North American mothers, the Japanese mothers requested proportionately less description from their children. (2) Both in terms of frequency and proportion, the Japanese mothers gave less evaluation and showed more verbal attention to children than did North American mothers. (3) Japanese mothers pay verbal attention more frequently to boys than to girls. In addition, at five years, Japanese children produce 1·22 utterances per turn on average, while North American children produce 2·00 utterances per turn, a significant difference. Thus, by frequently showing verbal attention to their children's narrative contributions, Japanese mothers not only support their children's talk about the past but also make sure that it begins to take the shape of narration valued in their culture. The production of short narratives in Japan is understood and valued differently from such production in North America.

This paper brings a quantitative study of children's noun plural overregularizations (foots, mans) to bear on recent comparisons of connectionist and symbolic models of language. The speech of 10 English-speaking children (aged 1;3 to 5;2) from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney & Snow, 1985, 1990) were analysed. The rate of noun overregularization is low, mean = 8·5%, demonstrating that children prefer correct to overregularized forms. Rates of noun overregularization are not significantly different from their rates of past tense overregularization, and noun plurals, like verb past tenses, follow a U-shaped developmental curve in which correct irregulars precede the first overregularized forms. These facts suggest that plural and past tense overregularizations are caused by similar underlying processes. The results pose challenges to connectionist models, but are consistent with Marcus et al.'s (1992) blocking-and-retrieval-failure model in which regulars are generated by a default rule while irregulars are retrieved from the lexicon.

Vocabulary development of three children (aged 1;6–1;8 at the start of the study) who had not begun to evidence a vocabulary spurt even though their productive vocabularies already included well over 50 words was followed to determine if these children eventually would have a vocabulary spurt. All three children evidenced a spurt, beginning at a mean productive vocabulary size of 112 words. The vocabulary spurt occurred at about the same time as the children first demonstrated the ability to sort objects exhaustively and to fast map new object names. Results are discussed in the context of Goldfield & Reznick's (1990; Reznick & Goldfield, 1992) argument that a substantial proportion of children never evidence a vocabulary spurt.