Murray & Trevarthen (1986) experimentally manipulated the behaviours of mothers and infants in an attempt to determine who is responsible for the fine temporal patterning during vocal engagements. In the present note it is argued that the measures of content and style of maternal talk used by Murray and Trevarthen do not directly indicate the ways in which the behaviours of the partners are combined on a moment-to-moment basis.

It was hypothesized that if young children could be taught the verbal cues used to elicit syntactic constructions from adults, children could respond just as adults do in terms of language performance. A series of stories was used to teach six 4- to 5-year-old children to identify objects as ‘nouns’, attributes of objects as ‘adjectives’, and actions as ‘verbs’. These form-class labels were then used as cues to request production of ANV (adjective-noun-verb) and ANVAN (adjective-noun-verb-adjective-noun) sentences. Though no child had produced this descriptive form during the pre-test, all children used such sentences in describing five post-test stories; responses in a control group showed that ANVAN sentences would not have been produced by prompting more elaborate description of the stories. All six children appeared to have well-formed semantic fields for nouns, adjectives and verbs.

Early in the development of language, children must learn to relate the language they hear to objects and events in their immediate perceptual environment. Gilmore (1977) found that infants at the two-word stage of language production and, under certain conditions, some infants at the one-word stage as well, seemed to map a simple sentence (e.g. The bunny hugs the kitty) onto a visual event (which, for example, showed a puppet rabbit hugging a puppet cat). In Gilmore's experiment, a habituation series of trials, presenting either appropriate pairings of a variety of sentences with visual events (as in the above example), or inappropriate pairings (e.g. The kitty hugs the bunny, when, in fact, the reverse was true) were presented repeatedly until subjects habituated. A test series of trials followed with an inappropriate/appropriate pairing, whichever was not used during habituation. Two-word subjects seemed to discriminate between the test and habituation pairings in either case. One-word subjects seemed to discrimi- nate only when they received the appropriate pairing during habituation and the inappropriate during the test.

To better understand how toddlers integrate multiple learning strategies to acquire verbs, we compared sensorimotor recruitment and comparison learning because both strategies are thought to boost children's access to scene-level information. For sensorimotor recruitment, we tested having toddlers use dolls as agents and compared this strategy with having toddlers observe another person enact verbs with dolls. For comparison learning, we compared providing pairs of: (a) training scenes in which animate objects with similar body-shapes maintained agent/patient roles with (b) scenes in which objects with dissimilar body-shapes switched agent/patient roles. Only comparison learning boosted verb comprehension.

Languages employ different means to manifest the unaccusative-unergative distinction. In Mandarin Chinese, unaccusative verbs are allowed in the inversion construction “V-le NP”, while unergative verbs are not. This grammaticality contrast brings a presence/absence contrast between the two verb classes in the inversion construction in the input. Using an eye fixation task, we investigated whether Mandarin-learning 19-month-olds were sensitive to this specific input frequency contrast. We found that infants distinguished the grammatical versus ungrammatical uses of the two verb classes in the inversion construction “V-le NP” (Experiment 1). When the verb classes were in the “NP V-le” order (Experiment 2) (i.e., the same level of grammaticality), infants showed no evidence of a looking difference. These responses indicate toddlers’ sensitivity to the distribution of the two verb classes in the inversion construction. This distributional information is likely to be one of the potential cues that facilitate their acquisition of the unaccusative-unergative distinction.

Pointing plays a significant role in communication and language development. However, in spoken languages pointing has been viewed as a non-verbal gesture, whereas in sign languages, pointing is regarded to represent a linguistic unit of language. This study compared the use of pointing between seven bilingual hearing children of deaf parents (Kids of Deaf Adults [KODAs]) interacting with their deaf parents and five hearing children interacting with their hearing parents. Data were collected in 6-month intervals from the age of 1;0 to 3;0. Pointing frequency among the deaf parents and KODAs was significantly higher than among the hearing parents and their children. In signing dyads pointing frequency remained stable, whereas in spoken dyads it decreased during the follow-up. These findings suggested that pointing is a fundamental element of parent-child interaction, regardless of the language, but is guided by the modality, gestural and linguistic features of the language in question.

Computational cognitive modeling is a tool we can use to evaluate theories of syntactic acquisition. Here, I review several models implementing theories that integrate information from both linguistic and non-linguistic sources to learn different types of syntactic knowledge. Some of these models additionally consider the impact of factors coming from children’s developing non-linguistic cognition. I discuss some existing child behavioral work that can inspire future model-building, and conclude by considering more specifically how to build better models of syntactic acquisition.

Cochlear Implants (CIs) enhance linguistic skills in deaf or hard of hearing children (D/HH). However, the benefits of CIs have not been sufficiently studied, especially with regard to communicative-pragmatics, i.e., the ability to communicate appropriately in a specific context using different expressive means, such as language and extralinguistic or paralinguistic cues. The study aimed to assess the development of communicative-pragmatic ability, through the Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCo), in school-aged children with CIs, to compare their performance to a group of children with typical auditory development (TA), and to investigate if CI received under the age of 24 months promotes the typical development of such ability. Results show that children with CIs performed significantly worse than TA on the paralinguistic and contextual scales of the ABaCo. Finally, the age of first implantation had a significant role in the development of communicative-pragmatic ability.

We examined the influence of the lexical and grammatical aspect of events on pronoun resolution in adults (18 to 23 years, N = 46), adolescents (13 to 14 years, N=66) and children (7 to 11 years, N=192). Participants were presented with 64 two-sentence stimuli: the first sentence described events with two same gender protagonists; the second began with a personal pronoun and described a status that could be attributed to either protagonist. Participants recorded to whom the pronoun referred, in a booklet. For all groups, Subject resolutions were more likely for events (a) without endpoints relative to those with endpoints, and (b) described as ongoing rather than completed, but this latter influence was restricted to events with endpoints for adults and adolescents. The findings provide support for the Event Structure Hypothesis of pronoun resolution (Rohde, Kehler & Elman, 2006) and provide new insights into the development of pronoun resolution.

The evolution of young children's categories, as measured by category name production, was studied. The focus was on categories whose names initially were overextended. Four children (initially aged 1; 1 to 1; 3) were visited at home twice a week over a four- to six-month period, until they were approximately 1;7. The play sessions included eli-citations of the names of specially chosen objects. Results indicated that, as predicted, four sequences of category evolution were found, formed by the intersection of two factors: overlap vs. mutual exclusivity and first re-assignment separate vs. first re-assignment joint. As expected, most sequences involved initial overlap, and the choice of first reassignment option varied as a function of the relationship (hierarchical or non-hierarchical) between the initial child-basic category and the new category.

It is argued that previous assessments of children's knowledge of the hard to see type of construction were confounded by a variety of extra-linguistic factors. Therefore, the relatively delayed age of comprehension previously reported (6½–8 years) may have been due to younger children's deficiencies in extralinguistic skills. In the present study, with these extralinguistic complications eliminated, the passing age was found to be 5 years, and even 4-year-olds evidenced considerable knowledge of the target structure. Other findings were: variation in sentence difficulty as a function of the syntactic and/or aspectual character of the verb; high test–retest reliability at all levels of performance; and a necessary-but-not-sufficient empirical relation between comprehension of the target construction and the passive. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for the acquisition of this particular structure and for the general problem of detecting linguistic competence from performance.

Two experiments are reported, where the development of pragmatic communication skills was assessed in a simple but realistic setting, so that even the youngest speakers could construct consistently accurate messages. It was shown that children of up to six years are specifically hampered by the speaker's use of left and right, but not by the use of named landmarks. Children were also allowed to create their own messages. The ability of the speaker to use language which would be valuable to a particular listener could then be measured. The results show a development between six and seven years in speakers' ability to select and use linguistic forms which are appropriate to listeners' receptive skills, though speakers could use objectively accurate information at an earlier age.