Expressing Left-Right relations is challenging for speaking-children. Yet, this challenge was absent for signing-children, possibly due to iconicity in the visual-spatial modality of expression. We investigate whether there is also a modality advantage when speaking-children’s co-speech gestures are considered. Eight-year-old child and adult hearing monolingual Turkish speakers and deaf signers of Turkish-Sign-Language described pictures of objects in various spatial relations. Descriptions were coded for informativeness in speech, sign, and speech-gesture combinations for encoding Left-Right relations. The use of co-speech gestures increased the informativeness of speakers’ spatial expressions compared to speech-only. This pattern was more prominent for children than adults. However, signing-adults and children were more informative than child and adult speakers even when co-speech gestures were considered. Thus, both speaking- and signing-children benefit from iconic expressions in visual modality. Finally, in each modality, children were less informative than adults, pointing to the challenge of this spatial domain in development.

We analysed both structural and functional aspects of sentences containing the four adverbials “after”, “before”, “because”, and “if” in two dense corpora of parent-child interactions from two British English-acquiring children (2;00–4;07). In comparing mothers’ and children's usage we separate out the effects of frequency, cognitive complexity and pragmatics in explaining the course of acquisition of adverbial sentences. We also compare these usage patterns to stimuli used in a range of experimental studies and show how differences may account for some of the difficulties that children have shown in experiments. In addition, we report descriptive data on various aspects of adverbial sentences that have not yet been studied as a resource for future investigations.

This study tested the claim of input-based accounts of language acquisition that children's inflectional errors reflect competition between different forms of the same verb in memory. In order to distinguish this claim from the claim that inflectional errors reflect the use of a morphosyntactic default, we focused on the Japanese verb system, which shows substantial by-verb variation in the frequency distribution of past and nonpast forms. 22 children aged 3;2–5;8 (Study 1) and 26 children aged 2;7–4;11 (Study 2) completed elicited production studies designed to elicit past and nonpast forms of 20 verbs (past-biased and nonpast-biased). Children made errors in both directions, using past forms in nonpast contexts, and vice versa, with the likelihood of each determined by the frequency bias of the two forms in the input language, even after controlling for telicity. This bi-directional pattern provides particularly direct evidence for the role of frequency-sensitive competition between stored forms.

Crain & Thornton (1998: 5) are admirably clear in stating the aims of their research programme: they ‘hope to convince a greater number of students and researchers in child language of the correctness of the Innateness Hypothesis and the theory of Universal Grammar’. As Drozd notes, however, their assumptions under Modularity Matching ‘set the stage for a research programme unlike those typically adopted by developmental psycholinguists’. Whereas C&T are avowedly committed to the continuity assumption (clearly preferring ‘special nativism’ over ‘general nativism’; O'Grady, 1997), constructivists are more interested in the question of how children ‘get from here to there’ (Tomasello, 2003) – that is, from immature levels of language comprehension and use to adultlike levels (and, it is important to note that adultlike levels are not always characterized in generativist terms). Most constructivists are also committed to studying the relations between language development and other simultaneously developing social and cognitive skills (Clark, 2003), whereas nativists tend to be interested in ‘pure’ linguistic ability uncontaminated by nonlinguistic influences. The main goal of nativists then is to verify a specific theory of linguistic competence that suggests that linguistic knowledge is innate and modular and to account for children's linguistic development in terms of UG, whereas the main goal for constructivists is to account for development (change) in the child's language system (beginning from perhaps no predetermined linguistic knowledge) and how it relates to other aspects of development. It is this fundamental difference in goals that makes one quite pessimistic that constructivist and nativist researchers in syntactic development can learn anything from one another; they are simply engaged in separate tasks.

This study examines how children understand the argumentative function of the French connective même (‘even’). Two completion tasks, related to the argumentative properties of the morpheme, were used: (1) to infer the conclusion of an ‘even’ sentence, and (2) to infer the argument position. Two main factors likely to influence the comprehension were investigated: the semantic context, and the syntactic form – affirmative vs negative. The argumentative function of même was globally mastered at the age of eight, but comprehension depends on semantic context. Performances were better for negative sentences, which suggests that negation plays a facilitating role; the specific properties of the negative expression pas même/même pas (‘not even’) in discourse are discussed.

This research brings new evidence on early lexical acquisition in Wichi, an under-studied indigenous language in which verbs occupy a privileged position in the input and in conjunction with nouns are characterized by a complex and rich morphology. Focusing on infants ranging from one- to three-year-olds, we analyzed the parental report of infants’ vocabulary (Study 1) and naturalistic speech samples of children and their caregivers (Study 2). Results reveal that: (1) although verbs predominate in the linguistic input, children's lexicons favor nouns over verbs; (2) children's early noun-advantage decreases, coming into closer alignment with the patterns in the linguistic input at a MLU of 1.5; and (3) this early transition is temporally related to children's increasing productive command over the grammatical categories that characterize the morphology of both nouns and verbs. These findings emphasize the early effects of language-specific properties of the input, broadening the vantage point from which to view the lexical acquisition process.

Previous research shows that two-year-olds' third person singular -s and plural -s are produced more accurately in utterance-final compared to utterance-medial position. However, only the third person singular is affected by coda complexity. This study explores these effects with possessive -s. Acoustic analysis of twelve two-year-olds' elicited imitations examined the use of simple versus complex codas (e.g. Sue's vs. Doug's) both utterance-medially and utterance-finally. Morpheme production was surprisingly robust across contexts, though coda clusters were often simplified to a lengthened -s morpheme utterance-medially (e.g., Dou's [dɐz]). The findings raise many questions about the development of speech planning processes across populations.

Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have language difficulties of unknown origin. Syntactic profiles are atypical, with poor performance on non-canonical structures, e.g. object relatives, suggesting a localized deficit. However, existing analyses using ANOVAs are problematic because they do not systematically address unequal variance, or fully model random effects. Consequently, a Generalised Linear Model (GLM) was used to analyze data from a Sentence Repetition (SR) task involving relative clauses. seventeen children with SLI (mean age 6;7), twenty-one Language Matched (LM) children (mean age 4;8), and seventeen Age Matched (AM) children (mean age 6;5) repeated 100 canonical and non-canonical sentences. ANOVAs found a significant Group by Canonicity interaction for the SLI versus AM contrast only. However, the GLM found no significant interaction. Consequently, arguments for a localized deficit may depend on statistical methods which are prone to exaggerate profile differences. Nonetheless, a subgroup of SLI exhibited particularly severe structural language difficulties.

During the first two years of life, infants concurrently refine native-language speech categories and word learning skills. However, in the Switch Task, 14-month-olds do not detect minimal contrasts in a novel object–word pairing (Stager & Werker, 1997). We investigate whether presenting infants with acoustically salient contrasts (liquids) facilitates success in the Switch Task. The first two experiments demonstrate that acoustic differences boost infants’ detection of contrasts. However, infants cannot detect the contrast when the segments are digitally shortened. Thus, not all minimal contrasts are equally difficult, and the acoustic properties of a contrast matter in word learning.

Fast mapping weaknesses in children with specific language impairment (SLI) may be explained by differences in disambiguation, mapping an unknown word to an unnamed object. The impact of language ability and linguistic stimulus on disambiguation was investigated. Sixteen children with SLI (8 preschool, 8 school-age) and sixteen typically developing age-matched children selected referents given familiar and unfamiliar object pairs in three ambiguous conditions: phonologically distinct word (PD), phonologically similar word (PS), no word (NW). Preschoolers with SLI did not disambiguate, unlike typically developing age-matched participants, who consistently selected unfamiliar objects given PD. School-age children with SLI disambiguated given PD. Delays in disambiguation for young children with SLI suggest limitations in processes that facilitate word learning for typically developing children. School-age children with SLI consistently selected familiar objects for PS, unlike typically developing children, suggesting differences in phonological activation for word learning.

Rispoli (1999) suggests that previous studies arguing for a contingency between the case of subject pronouns and the presence/absence of verbal agreement in the acquisition of English (e.g. Schütze, 1997) suffer from methodological problems, and presents new data that fail to support earlier findings. I show that Rispoli's methodology unnecessarily biases his study against finding the predicted contingencies: it fails to take account of children's productive lexical inventory of pronoun forms. As a result, syntactic versus morphological sources of error fail to be distinguished. I explain why this distinction is crucial within the AGR/Tense Omission Model, and clarify its predictions.

Reading is one of the most important milestones a child achieves throughout development. Above the letter level, the syllable has been shown to play a relevant role at early stages of visual word recognition in adult skilled readers. However, studies aiming to examine when, during reading acquisition, the syllable emerges as a functional sublexical unit are scarce, and the studies conducted so far have led to inconsistent results. In this work, beginning and intermediate European-Portuguese (EP) developing readers performed a sandwich masked lexical decision task in which CV (e.g., RU.MOR[rumour]) and CVC (e.g., CIS.NE[swan]) first-syllable EP words were preceded either by syllable congruent (e.g., rum.ba-RU.MOR, cis.ra-CIS.NE), syllable incongruent (e.g., rum.ba-RU.MOR, ci.ser-CIS.NE), unrelated (e.g., va.cra-RU.MOR, zar.vo-CIS.NE) pseudowords primes, or identity (e.g., ru.mour-RU.MOUR, cis.ne-CIS.NE) primes. Results showed reliable syllable effects only for intermediate readers and for CV and CVC words alike. Findings are discussed attending to current models of visual word recognition.

Child partners were compared on their relative tendency to use the interrogative form in spontaneous dyadic verbal interactions. A given child's tendency to use the interrogative form more frequently than the other member of the dyad remained constant across partners. This relative stability in formulating utterances in interrogative form cannot be attributed to the child's producing more talk in general than the partner. The observed effect is explained as a type of conversational synchrony in which participants achieve a complementary balance rather than congruence. It was concluded that the interrogative form is a linguistic means for child peers to establish cooperation as well as controlling kinds of relationships during an ongoing interaction.

This paper seeks to account for a culturally patterned set of analogic renamings found in Huli baby talk, nursery rhymes and children's verbal games. These socialization activities evidence a marked concern with body motifs and appellations. In accordance with ethnographic paradigms of explanation, the frame of reference is broadened to include consideration of inter-adult behaviour involving ‘talk about the body’ to assess what is being learnt from such interactions as well as what communicative intents are encoded. The argument is developed that in addition to the significance of these play routines in sensitizing the child to cultural rules about speaking, these ludic forms also appear implicated in both an evolutionary and logico-operational sense in the conventional anatomical nomenclature.

Kindergarteners, grouped according to number conservation ability, were asked to explain their choices of more and less in a series of parallel tasks requiring comparative judgements of continuous quantities. Errors on less tasks, as well as correct choices of more, were often determined by the non-linguistic strategy of choosing the greater amount. Non-conservers were more likely than conservers or transitional conservers to rely on this strategy. Furthermore, mature semantic knowledge of more was found to precede the development of a similar understanding of less. Non-conservers were less likely than conservers or transitionals to have a mature understanding of either term.