This study reports on four school-age boys' use of the specialized register of sportscasting as performed both spontaneously and when elicited by the researcher, and compares the boys' production of formal register-marking features to adult usage. Like the commentary of professional sportscasters, the boys' commentating is characterized by heavy use of simple-present action verbs, use of constructions lacking elements that are ordinarily grammatically required (the subject pronoun he, an auxiliary verb, or a main verb), and (in the elicited version) frequent occurrence of passives. The boys invest the most ‘ungram-matical’ utterance types (those lacking finite verbs) with a function that is not clearly present in adult sportscasting discourse, that of pointing forward in the discourse.

Two experiments were devised in order to better understand the relationship between temporal before and after and their spatial counterparts. In Experiment I, sixty adults were probed for their spatial metaphoric understanding of temporal before and after. Although H. Clark proposed that temporal before and after were derived from their spatial counterparts, Experiment I did not support that notion. In fact, the subjects overwhelmingly reported that temporal before was more related to spatial after and that temporal after was more related to spatial before. Since it has been shown by numerous investigators that temporal before is acquired before temporal after by children, the evidence from Experiment I suggested that their spatial relatives may be acquired similarly. Experiment II presents evidence that indeed spatial after is understood better by three-year-old children than spatial before. This evidence is coincident with the adult reports in Experiment I.

Linguistic expressions of locative spatial relations in sign languages are mostly visually motivated representations of space involving mapping of entities and spatial relations between them onto the hands and the signing space. These are also morphologically complex forms. It is debated whether modality-specific aspects of spatial expressions modulate spatial language development differently in signing compared to speaking children. In a picture description task, we compared the use of locative expressions for containment, support, and occlusion relations by deaf children acquiring Turkish Sign Language and hearing children acquiring Turkish (age 3;5–9;11). Unlike previous reports suggesting a boosting effect of iconicity, and/or a hindering effect of morphological complexity of the locative forms in sign languages, our results show similar developmental patterns for signing and speaking children's acquisition of these forms. Our results suggest the primacy of cognitive development guiding the acquisition of locative expressions by speaking and signing children.

We examined parents' two-word utterances expressing core syntactic relations in order to test the hypothesis that they may enable children to derive the atoms of hierarchical syntax, namely, the asymmetrical Merge/Dependency relation between pairs of words, and, in addition, to identify variables serving generative syntactic rules. Using a large English-language parental corpus, we located all two-word utterances containing a verb and its subject, object, or indirect object. Analysis showed that parental two-word sentences contain transparent information on the binary dependency/merge relation responsible for syntactic connectivity. The syntactic atoms modelled in the two-word input contain natural variables for dependents, making generalization to other contexts an immediate possibility. In a second study, a large sample of children were found to use the same verbs in the great majority of their early sentences expressing the same core grammatical relations. The results support a learning model according to which children learn the basics of syntax from parental two-word sentences.

Bilinguals need to learn two words for most concepts. These words are called translation equivalents, and those that also sound similar (e.g., banana–banane) are called cognates. Research has consistently shown that children and adults process and name cognates more easily than non-cognates. The present study explored if there is such an advantage for cognate production in bilinguals’ early vocabulary development. Longitudinal expressive vocabulary data were collected from 47 English–French bilinguals starting at 16–20 months up to 27 months (a total of 219 monthly administrations in both English and French). Children produced a greater proportion of cognates than non-cognates, and the interval between producing a word and its translation equivalent was about 10–15 days shorter for cognates than for non-cognates. The findings suggest that cognate learning is facilitated in early bilingual vocabulary development, such that phonological overlap supports bilinguals in learning phonologically similar words across their two languages.

Caregiver abstract talk during shared reading predicts preschool-age children’s vocabulary development. However, previous research has focused on level of abstraction with less consideration of the style of extratextual talk. Here, we investigated the relation between these two dimensions of extratextual talk, and their contributions to variance in children’s vocabulary skills. Caregiver level of abstraction was associated with an interactive reading style. Controlling for socioeconomic status and child age, high interactivity predicted children’s concurrent vocabulary skills whereas abstraction did not. Controlling for earlier vocabulary skills, neither dimension of the extratextual talk predicted later vocabulary. Theoretical and practical relevance are discussed.

Variegation – the presence of more than one supraglottal consonant per word – is a key challenge for children as they increase their expressive vocabulary toward the end of the single-word period. Here we consider the prosodic structures of target words and child forms in English, Finnish, French, Japanese and Mandarin to determine whether children learning these languages respond similarly to the challenge or instead differ in ways related to the phonological structure of the adult language. Based on proportional occurrence of each structure, we find that the word forms of children learning Mandarin and Japanese show more variegation than do those of children learning the European languages, although their target words do not; proportions of reduplication, consonant harmony and single-consonant words also differ by language. We conclude that experience with the structure of the language – and thus representation, as well as immature articulatory skills – shapes children’s responses to variegation.

It is argued in this paper that 4-year-old children do not perform logical operations corresponding to formal logic upon the sentential components of implicative verbs to produce the indirect implications, as was suggested by Macnamara, Baker & Olson (1976). First, it is shown that the indirect implications tested by Macnamara et al. are not the implications which would be derived on the basis of formal reasoning. Second, additional empirical evidence is presented to show that when children hear a story containing a sentence with an implicative verb they do not combine the sentential components of that implicative verb (i.e. the presuppositions and implicative) to arrive at the implication of their conjunction. It is argued that the children draw upon their past personal knowledge concerning the event described in the story and import additional premises where necessary in order to derive the indirect implications.

An acting-out task and two modified forms of the token-assignment task described by Braine & Wells (1978) were used to test the ability of 72 children aged 3;0–4;6 to identify the actor in an event; in one token-assignment task the children were required to respond after watching silent enactments of transitive events, and in the other the children heard verbal descriptions of similar events. Comparison of individual response patterns across the tasks revealed that whereas 62 of the 72 children could identify the actor in the non-verbal task, 19 of them subsequently failed to perform as well when they had to base their judgement on active sentences in the verbal task; and of the 44 who responded accurately in the verbal token-assignment task only 34 responded consistently correctly when required to act out those sentences. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for the development of syntactic comprehension.

In a recent commentary, Grinstead (2000) argues against Bates & Goodman's (1999) claims that the development of grammar is contingent on developments in the lexicon, and that, therefore, there is no need for an independent grammar domain. Citing data on the acquisition of negative commands in Catalan and Spanish, Grinstead argues that beyond grammatical elements that are linked with lexical items, there must also exist independently a computational component, which includes grammatical constraints. He argues further that these constraints are observed from the beginning of acquisition. The purpose of this note is, first, to challenge the evidence Grinstead brings to bear in support of this position and, second, to argue further that the acquisition of negative commands in Spanish is better understood in terms of item-based learning combined with low functional load.

The current study investigated the role of resumption in the interpretation of object relative clauses (RCs) in Persian-speaking children. Sixty-four (N=64) children aged 3;2–6;0 (M=4;8) completed a referent selection task that tested their comprehension of subject RCs, gapped object RCs, and object RCs containing either a resumptive pronoun or an object clitic. The results showed that the presence of a resumptive element (pronoun or clitic) had a facilitative effect on children's processing of object RCs. In both cases object RCs with resumptive elements were interpreted more accurately than gapped subject and object RCs, suggesting that resumptive elements ease processing burden in syntactically complex contexts because they provide local cues to thematic role assignment.

Children's early vocabulary shows sex differences – with boys having smaller vocabularies than age-comparable girls – a pattern that becomes evident in both singletons and twins. Twins also use fewer words than their singleton peers. However, we know relatively less about sex differences in early gesturing in singletons or twins, and also how singletons and twins might differ in their early gesture use. We examine the patterns of speech and gesture production of singleton and twin children, ages 0;10-to-3;4, during structured parent-child play. Boys and girls – singleton or twin – were similar in speech and gesture production, but singletons used a greater amount and diversity of speech and gestures than twins. There was no effect of twin dyad type (boy-boy, girl-girl, boy-girl) on either speech or gesture production. These results confirm earlier research showing close integration between gesture and speech in singletons in early language development, and further extend these patterns to twin children.

The input language addressed to 18 language-learning children (MLU 1.00–3.00) was analysed so as to assess the quality of the semanticsyntactic correspondence posited by the semantic bootstrapping hypothesis. The correspondence appears to be quite satisfactory with little variation from the lower to the higher MLUs. All the persons and things referred to in the corpora were labelled by the mothers using nouns. All the actions referred to were labelled using verbs. Most of the attributive information was conveyed by adjectives. Spatial information was expressed through the use of spatial prepositions. As to the functional categories, all agents of actions and causes of events were encoded as subjects of sentences. All patients, themes, sources, goals, locations, and instruments were encoded as objects of sentences (either direct or oblique). This good semantic-syntactic correspondence may make the child's construction of grammatical categories easier.

The generalisation of linguistic constructions is performed through analogical reasoning. Children with developmental language disorders (DLD) are impaired in analogical reasoning and in generalisation. However, these processes are improved by an input involving variability and similarity. Here we investigated the performance of children with or without DLD in a construction generalisation task. We also compared their performance following training with an input involving progressive alignment (combining similarity and variability) or high variability. Progressive alignment improves construction generalisation in children with or without DLD, which could have implications for our understanding of language development and for interventions conducted with children with DLD.

We test the comprehension of transitive sentences in very young learners of Mandarin Chinese using a combination of the weird word order paradigm with the use of pseudo-verbs and the preferential looking paradigm, replicating the experiment of Franck et al. (2013) on French. Seventeen typically-developing Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.4 months) participated and the same experiment was conducted with eighteen adults. The results show that hearing well-formed NP-V-NP sentences triggered infants to fixate more on a transitive scene than on a reflexive scene. In contrast, when they heard deviant NP-NP-V sequences, no such preference pattern was found, a performance pattern that is adult-like. This is at variance with some of the results from Candan et al. (2012), who only found evidence for canonical word order comprehension at almost age 3 when considering fixation time. Furthermore, within the age range tested, performance showed no effect of age or vocabulary size.

This paper examines the acquisition of demonstratives (e.g., that, there) from a cross-linguistic perspective. Although demonstratives are often said to play a crucial role in L1 acquisition, there is little systematic research on this topic. Using extensive corpus data of spontaneous child speech, the paper investigates the emergence and development of demonstratives in three European (English, French, Spanish) and four non-European languages (Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Indonesian) between age 1;0 and 6;0. The data show that, across languages, demonstratives are among the earliest and most frequent child words, but their frequency decreases with age and MLU. As children grow older, they tend to use other types of referring terms (e.g., anaphoric pronouns) and other types of spatial expressions (e.g., adpositions). Considering these results, we hypothesize that children shift from using a body-oriented strategy of deictic communication to more abstract and disembodied strategies of encoding reference and space during the preschool years.

The study investigates whether Italian verbal inflectional morphology is associated with inhibitory control skills after controlling for receptive vocabulary and verbal working memory. A sample of Italian preschoolers aged 4;0 to 6;0 was assessed using a standardized inhibitory control task tapping two different inhibitory skills (response inhibition and interference suppression), and a morphological task requiring simple and complex inflections of verbs. The hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that working memory and the interference suppression scores were significantly associated with complex inflections but not with simple inflections of the verbs.

We explored whether supported (SJE) or coordinated joint engagement (CJE) between mothers recruited from the community and their 24-month-old children who were slow-to-talk at 18 months old were associated with child language scores at ages 24, 36, and 48 months (n = 197). We further explored whether SJE or CJE modified the concurrent positive associations between maternal responsive behaviours and language scores. Previous research has shown that SJE, maternal expansions, imitations, and responsive questions were associated with better language scores. Our main finding was that SJE but not CJE was consistently positively associated with 24- and 36-month-old expressive and receptive language scores, but not with 48-month-old language scores. SJE modified how expansions and imitations, but not responsive questions, were associated with language scores; the associations were evident in all but the highest levels of SJE. Further research is necessary to test these findings in other samples before clinical recommendations can be made.

Two experiments examined the development of children's understanding of the difference between want and need. In experiment 1, children were tested on their knowledge that want represents an intrinsic desire whereas need represents an instrumental desire. Forty-five children between three and five years of age heard four stories in which one character encountered a problem, while another did not. A desirable object which could alleviate the problem was then introduced, and after both characters requested the object, the children were asked whether each character wants the object or needs it. Three-year-olds were unable to differentiate the two terms in such contexts, whereas four- and five-year-olds were significantly more likely to say that the character experiencing the problem needed the object, while the other wanted it. In experiment 2, 45 subjects between three and five years of age were tested on their understanding that a request employing need expresses a stronger desire than one employing want. Subjects were required to give an object to one of two characters, one of whom asked for it using need and the other using want. In this experiment, three-year-olds were equally likely to give the object to the character using want as to the one using need. Both four- and five–year–olds were significantly more likely to give the object to the character who used need. The results from these two experiments show that the understanding of the semantic and pragmatic difference between want and need develops at about four years of age.