Rosemarie Tracy is leaving the Editorial Team. I would like to thank her sincerely for the hard work and care that she has put into her work as Associate Editor over the last three years and to welcome Clifton Pye of the University of Kansas and Paul Fletcher of the University of Hong Kong as new Associate Editors.

Final Syllable Lengthening (FSL) has been extensively examined in infant vocalizations in order to determine whether its basis is biological or learned. Findings suggest there may be a U-shaped developmental trajectory for FSL. The present study sought to verify this pattern and to determine whether vocal maturity and deafness influence FSL. Eight normally hearing infants, aged 0;3 to 1;0, and eight deaf infants, aged 0;8 to 4;0, were examined at three levels of prelinguistic vocal development: precanonical, canonical, and postcanonical. FSL was found at all three levels suggesting a biological basis for this phenomenon. Individual variability was, however, considerable. Reduction in the magnitude of FSL across the three sessions provided some support for a downward trend for FSL in infancy. Findings further indicated that auditory deprivation can significantly affect temporal aspects of infant speech production.

In a first study, we considered whether modelling and the type of an adult's request influenced children's ability at 1;8 and 2;2 to comprehend gestures and replica objects as symbols for familiar objects. In a second study, we evaluated whether modelling and type of request influenced children's ability at 1;8 (N=24) to understand unfamiliar (i.e. unconventional) objects as symbols. Results of Study 1 indicated that children at 2;2 comprehended a gesture as a symbol in the absence of any previous model demonstration. All children comprehended a replica as standing for another object, although modelling marginally improved children's performance at 2;2 and decreased performance at 1;8. In general, the type of request did not influence children's comprehension of gestures or replicas as symbols. Results of Study 2 showed that modelling and request type did not influence children's understanding of objects that are unconventional and novel, as symbols. The studies converge to suggest that symbolic comprehension is a highly context-dependent ability that continues to develop over the second year.

This paper explores ‘fast mapping’, one of several processes that have been proposed to be involved in the rapid vocabulary expansion observed in the preschool years. An adaptation of a receptive word matching task examined how well children retained a just-mapped relation between word and referent when some information was later missing. Thirty-nine children between the ages of 3;0 and 5;6 (mean age 4;3) were taught to select a black square if the correct match for a spoken label was not visible in an array of pictures presented on a computer screen. This procedure allowed children to respond even when they perceived that the correct referent was absent. In experimental sessions, children experienced a single exposure to a word-referent relation. Then, under one condition they heard the just-learned label but were not presented with the matching referent; instead, a completely novel referent was visible along with the black square. Under another condition, they were presented with a just-learned referent (and the black square) but heard a completely new label. The question of interest was whether the children appreciated that an earlier-learned map precluded re-assigning a label to a new referent or re-assigning a referent with a second new label. If so, they should select the black square under both conditions. The majority of children (69%) resisted re-assigning a just-mapped label to a completely novel referent and selected the black square, even when the original referent was not in sight. However, fewer of these children resisted accepting a second label for a just-named referent (46%). Older children were significantly more likely to adhere to original maps than were younger children.

Children learning English often omit grammatical words and morphemes, but there is still much debate over exactly why and in what contexts they do so. This study investigates the acquisition of three elements which instantiate the grammatical category of ‘inflection’ – copula be, auxiliary be and 3sg present agreement – in longitudinal transcripts from five children, whose ages range from 1;6 to 3;5 in the corpora examined. The aim is to determine whether inflection emerges as a unitary category, as predicted by some recent generative accounts, or whether it develops in a more piecemeal fashion, consistent with constructivist accounts. It is found that for each child the relative pace of development of the three morphemes studied varies significantly, suggesting that these morphemes do not depend on a unitary underlying category. Furthermore, early on, be is often used primarily with particular closed-class subjects, suggesting that forms such as he's and that's are learned as lexically specific constructions. These findings are argued to support the idea that children learn ‘inflection’ (and by hypothesis, other functional categories) not by filling in pre-specified slots in an innate structure, but by learning some specific constructions involving particular lexical items, before going on to gradually abstract more general construction types.

Two-year-olds learn language quickly but how they exploit adult input remains obscure. Twenty-nine children aged 2;6 to 3;2, divided into three treatment groups, participated in an intervention experiment consisting of four sessions 1 week apart. Pre- and post-intervention sessions were identical for all children: children heard a wh-question and attempted to repeat it; a ‘talking bear’ answered. That same format was used for the two intervention sessions for children in a quasicontrol condition (Group QC). Children receiving modelling (Group M) heard a question twice before repeating it; those receiving implicit correction (Group IC) heard a question, attempted to repeat it, and heard it again. All groups improved in supplying and inverting an auxiliary for target questions with trained auxiliaries. Only experimental children generalized to auxiliaries on which they had not been trained. Very little input, if concentrated but varied, and presented so that the child attends to it and attempts to parse it, is sufficient for the rapid extraction and generalization of syntactic regularities. Children can learn even more efficiently than has been thought.

Verbs of agency denote relations between behavioural and mental states. Thus, ‘Jim is looking for X’ goes beyond a behavioural description, to take a mentalistic construal whereby Jim's desire for success, and his beliefs about how to search, explain his observed actions. Greek has two verbs of agency that can be used somewhat interchangeably by adults to mean ‘to look for’. The hypothesis is that young children will obey the principle of contrast to diagnose that one verb is mentalistic and the other verb is to be construed behaviourally. Following a study of mothers' verb-use, two studies with 238 children aged three to five years confirmed that the verb preferred in home use gave below-chance performance on a false-belief test whilst the less-established verb gave above-chance success, with children giving appropriate justifications. Thus, Greek preschoolers seem sometimes to have an adult-type understanding and sometimes fail to match the adult understanding. The proposal is that the children initially convert an adult verb-use pragmatic difference into a semantic contrast.

In this study I examine Venezuelan children's developing abilities to use evaluative language in fictional and personal narratives. The questions addressed are: (1) How does the use of evaluative language vary in fictional and personal narratives? (2) Is there a relationship between the use of evaluative language in these two narrative genres and children's age and socio-economic status (SES)? The sample consists of 444 narratives produced by 113 Venezuelan school-age children participating in 4 narrative tasks, in which personal and fictional stories were elicited. Findings suggest that age and socio-economic status have a greater impact on the use of evaluation in fictional stories than in personal narratives. Low SES and younger children are at a greater disadvantage when performing fictional narratives than when performing personal narratives. These results strongly imply that children's narrative competence cannot be assessed in a single story-telling task, given the importance that task-related factors seem to have on narrative abilities.

Van Valin (Journal of Child Language29, 2002, 161–75) presents a critique of Rowland & Pine (Journal of Child Language27, 2000, 157–81) and argues that the wh-question data from Adam (in Brown, A first language, Cambridge, MA, 1973) cannot be explained in terms of input frequencies as we suggest. Instead, he suggests that the data can be more successfully accounted for in terms of Role and Reference Grammar. In this note we re-examine the pattern of inversion and uninversion in Adam's wh-questions and argue that the RRG explanation cannot account for some of the developmental facts it was designed to explain.

Parent report data on early language development measured using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (CDI–Infant Form) was collected on 134 preschool children with autism spectrum disorder. The pattern of development of understanding of phrases, word comprehension and expression, and production of gestures, was compared to the typical pattern. In common with typical development there was considerable variability in language acquisition, although for the group as a whole this was significantly delayed compared to the normal course. In addition, atypical patterns were identified in the emergence of language skills in the sample. Comprehension of words was delayed in comparison to word production, and production of early gestures (involving sharing reference) was delayed relative to production of later gestures (involving use of objects). However, other aspects of language development were similar to that found in typically developing infants, including word comprehension being in advance of word production in absolute terms, gesture production acting as a ‘bridge’ between word comprehension and word production and the broad pattern of acquisition across word categories and word forms. The implications for assessment and intervention with preschool children with autism spectrum disorder are discussed.