This study examines infants' joint attention behavior and language development in a rural village in Nigeria. Participants included eight younger (1;0 to 1;5, M age=1;2) and eight older toddlers (1;7 to 2;7, M age=2;1). Joint attention behaviors in social interaction contexts were recorded and coded at two time points six months apart. Analyses revealed that these toddlers were producing more high-level joint attention behaviors than less complex behaviors. In addition, the quality and quantity of behaviors produced by these Nigerian children was similar to those found in other cultures. In analyses of children's noun and verb comprehension and production (in relation to the number of nouns or verbs on a parental checklist), parents reported proportionally more verbs than nouns, perhaps because Ngas has some linguistic characteristics that are similar to languages in which a noun bias is not seen (e.g. Mandarin Chinese). An examination of the interrelations of joint attention and language development revealed that joint attention behaviors were related to both noun and verb development at different times. The set of results is important for understanding the emergence of joint attention in traditional cultures, the comprehension and production of nouns and verbs given the specific linguistic properties of a language, and the importance that early social contexts may have for language development.

Research on the development of efficiency in spoken language understanding has focused largely on middle-class children learning English. Here we extend this research to Spanish-learning children (n=49; M=2;0; range=1;3–3;1) living in the USA in Latino families from primarily low socioeconomic backgrounds. Children looked at pictures of familiar objects while listening to speech naming one of the objects. Analyses of eye movements revealed developmental increases in the efficiency of speech processing. Older children and children with larger vocabularies were more efficient at processing spoken language as it unfolds in real time, as previously documented with English learners. Children whose mothers had less education tended to be slower and less accurate than children of comparable age and vocabulary size whose mothers had more schooling, consistent with previous findings of slower rates of language learning in children from disadvantaged backgrounds. These results add to the cross-linguistic literature on the development of spoken word recognition and to the study of the impact of socioeconomic status (SES) factors on early language development.

The study investigates the development of English multiword negation, in particular the negation of zero marked verbs (e.g. no sleep, not see, can't reach) from a usage-based perspective. The data was taken from a dense database consisting of the speech of an English-speaking child (Brian) aged 2;3–3;4 (MLU 2·05–3·1) and his mother. The focus of the study was the emergence and usage of negators in the child's and mother's speech (e.g. no, not, can't, won't, don't). Two analyses were conducted: firstly, the emergence and usage of all negators in Brian's speech and in the input were calculated in order to present an overall picture of negator usage across the sample. The findings indicate a gradual and systematic development of negator selection in Brian's speech which follows the trajectory no–not–'nt. The pattern of negator emergence was found to follow the frequency of negators in the input; that is negators used frequently in the input were the first to emerge in the child's speech. Secondly, a more fine-grained analysis of utterances containing negated zero marked verbs (neg V utterances) was conducted on both the child's and mother's speech. In the first instance the development of negator selection for all neg V utterances was calculated. The results indicated the same no–not–'nt cline as attested in the initial analysis. A function-based analysis of neg V utterances was also conducted which indicated that the speed of movement across the no–not–'nt cline varied from one function to the next. A function-based analysis of the input suggested that the speed at which Brian moved across the cline within a particular function could be traced to function-based frequency effects in the input. Thus the findings of the study indicate function-based, input-driven learning which is consistent with the usage-based approach. However the findings also indicate creative learning on the part of the child from the earliest stages of multiword negation.

This paper focuses on the aspects of the lexicon in 66 prematurely born very-low-birth-weight and 87 full-term Finnish children at 2;0, studied using the Finnish version of the MacArthur Communicative Developmental Inventory. The groups did not differ in vocabulary size. Furthermore, the female advantage in vocabulary size was not seen in preterm children. The overall shapes of the trajectories for the main lexical categories as a function of vocabulary size were highly similar in both groups and followed those described in the literature. However, there were significant differences in the percentage of nouns and grammatical function words between the two groups. The results suggest that prematurity ‘cuts off’ the female advantage in vocabulary development. Furthermore, it also seems that there are differences between prematurely born and full-term children in the composition of the lexicon at 2;0. The findings support the universal sequence in the development of lexical categories.

We present data on the language of space in Hungarian individuals with Williams syndrome (WS; 19 in the first, 15 in the second study, between 8;0 and 21;11) and a verbal control (VC) group of typically developing (TD; 19 in the first, 15 in the second study, between 3;5 and 10;7) children from: (1) a study of elicited production and comprehension of spatial terms; and (2) a sentence completion task on case markers in their spatial and non-spatial use. The first study showed poorer performance in the WS group, but similar performance patterns and a special difficulty of SOURCE terms in both groups. We did not find overall group differences in the second study. We argue that WS performance patterns reflect WS spatial abilities and seem to be constrained by the same factors in WS as in TD. Results also lead us to conclude that, contrary to most previous claims, there is no selective deficit of spatial terms within WS language, and they also suggest that not all uses of spatial terms require activation of mental models of space.

We report four act-out experiments testing the sensitivity of adults and three- to five-year-old children to the distinction between restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses in English. Specifically, we test knowledge of the fact that restrictive relative clauses cannot modify a proper name head, and of the fact that relatives introduced by that (as opposed to a wh-pronoun) are obligatorily restrictive. Both children and adults show knowledge of these properties. No support was found for the hypothesis that children extend the block on proper name heads to wh-relatives. Both children and adults are sensitive to the syntactic context (double object vs. existential) in which the relative clause is embedded. However, adults differ from children in four respects. First, in the double object context, adults are more likely than children to commit the error of construing a that relative as referring to a proper name head. Second, the effect of syntactic context on selection of a head is larger for adults than for children. Third, for adults, but not for children, the effect of syntactic context interacts with the type of relative clause. Fourth, adults, but not children, are influenced by whether they hear the existential context before the double object context. We propose that by three to four years of age children have acquired an adult-like grammar of relative clauses, and that the differences we see in child and adult performance can be attributed to that grammar in combination with a mature (adult) or immature (child) sentence processing capacity.

Using the weird word order methodology (Akhtar, 1999), we investigated children's understanding of SVO word order in French, a language with less consistent argument ordering patterns than English. One hundred and twelve French children (ages 2;10 and 3;9) heard either high or low frequency verbs modelled in either SOV or VSO order (both ungrammatical). Results showed that: (1) children were more likely to adopt a weird word order if they heard lower frequency verbs, suggesting gradual learning; (2) children in the high frequency conditions tended to correct the ungrammatical model they heard to the closest grammatical alternative, suggesting different models activated different grammatical schemas; and (3) children were less likely to express the object of a transitive verb than were English children in an equivalent study, suggesting object expression is more difficult to master in French, perhaps because of its inconsistency in the input. These findings are discussed in the context of a usage-based model of language acquisition.

The ability to extract meaning through the use of syntactic cues, adapted from Naigles' (1990) paradigm, was investigated in Hebrew-speaking children with autism, those with specific language impairment (SLI) and those with typical language development (TLD), in an attempt to shed light on similarities and differences between the two diagnostic categories, both defined by primary language deficits. Thirteen children with autism and 13 with SLI were matched on chronological age, level of language functioning and gender, and 13 children with TLD were matched to the children in the two clinical groups according to language level, as measured by the CELF-P. Children with autism and children with TLD learned novel words using the syntactical cues in the sentences in which they were presented, whereas children with SLI experienced more difficulty, learning only that which would be expected from chance according to the binomial test. Only 4 of the 13 children with SLI (31%) learned the new words, whereas 11 children with autism and 10 children with TLD learned the novel verb using syntactical cues from the sentence frame. The results are analyzed in terms of possible underlying mechanisms in language acquisition. Children with autism seem to rely on relatively intact syntactic abilities, while children with SLI seem to have marked impairment in using this mechanism in acquiring word meaning. Implications for future research and intervention with preschool children with primary language disorders are discussed.

It is claimed by Totereau, Thévenin & Fayol (1997) that French children understand the rule for spelling the plural inflection very early on. However, no evidence contradicts the alternative that they learn the spelling of a word's singular and plural forms by treating the two forms as entirely different words. We tested this by asking French first and second graders (85 six-year-old and 89 seven-year-old children, respectively) to read and write rare words, either in just the singular or in just the plural, and then testing their spelling. The children tended to attach plural inflections to words which they had encountered only as plural and to omit them from words encountered before only as singular.