Subject–verb (SV) agreement helps listeners interpret the number condition of ambiguous nouns (The sheep is/are fat), yet it remains unclear whether young children use agreement to comprehend newly encountered nouns. Preschoolers and adults completed a forced choice task where sentences contained singular vs. plural copulas (Where is/are the [novel noun(s)]?). Novel nouns were either morphologically unambiguous (tup/tups) or ambiguous (/geks/ = singular: gex / plural: gecks). Preschoolers (and some adults) ignored the singular copula, interpreting /ks/-final words as plural, raising questions about the role of SV agreement in learners’ sentence comprehension and the status of is in Australian English.

Children use pronouns in their speech from the earliest word combinations. Yet, it is not clear from these early utterances whether they understand that pronouns are used as substitutes for nouns and entities in the discourse. The aim of this study was to examine whether young children understand the anaphoric function of pronouns, focusing on the interpretation of the pronoun it in English-speaking children at 1;6 and 2;0. We tested whether adults and children would prefer to look at a previously introduced vs. novel visual object depending on the argument form (it, the + noun, a + noun, or silence). Results demonstrate that, like adults, two-year-olds understand that it refers to a previously introduced referent. There is no evidence that this knowledge is established in children at 1;6. This suggests that some time between 1;6 and 2;0 children come to understand that it refers to a highly accessible referent introduced in the prior context.

In error analyses using sentence repetition data, most authors focus on word types of omissions. The current study considers serial order in omission patterns independent of functional categories. Data was collected from Russian and German sentence repetition tasks performed by 53 five-year-old bilingual children. Number and positions of word omissions were analyzed. Serial order effects were found in both languages: medial errors made up the largest percentage of errors. Then, the position of omissions was compared to visuo-verbal n-back working memory and non-verbal visual forward short-term memory scores using stepwise hierarchical linear regression models, taking into account demographic variables and receptive language. The interaction differed between languages: there was a significant negative association between omissions in the medial position in German and the final position in Russian and the visuo-verbal n-back memory score. Our study contributes to the understanding of how working memory and language are intertwined in sentence repetition.

The present study investigated the roles of pattern detection capacities and understanding of intentions in children's learning of linguistic rules. We taught two-year-olds a Hebrew morphological distinction between noun and verb forms using two different training protocols. The protocols were identical in all parameters except that only in an Intentional, but not in a Control condition, were children introduced to the stimuli in an intentional communicative context. We found that children learned the morphological rule only in the Intentional condition. Thus, besides their pattern detection capacities, children's understanding of intentions substantially boosts their learning of meaningful rules.

Several aspects of early language skills, including parent-report measures of vocabulary, phoneme discrimination, speech segmentation, and speed of lexical access predict later childhood language outcomes. To date, no studies have examined the long-term predictive validity of novel word learning. We examined whether individual differences in novel word learning at 21 months predict later childhood receptive vocabulary outcomes rather than generalized cognitive abilities. Twenty-eight 21-month-olds were taught novel words using a modified version of the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm. Seventeen children (range 7–10 years) returned to participate in a longitudinal follow-up. Novel word learning in infancy uniquely accounted for 22% of the variance in childhood receptive vocabulary but did not predict later childhood visuospatial ability or non-verbal IQ. These results suggest that the ability to associate novel sound patterns to novel objects, an index of the process of word learning, may be especially important for long-term language mastery.

This paper presents the results of two experiments which appear to show that children's linguistic generalizational biases change from a semantically based system to a syntactic-structural system. The experiments use the constituent repetition paradigm of Read & Schreiber (1982). Subjects were trained to repeat the subject noun phrase in orally presented sentences. Preschoolers, but not second-graders, displayed a tendency to repeat the agentive noun phrase (contained in the by-phrase) in semantically irreversible passive sentences. It is argued that the results provide more evidence for a semantic-relational bias in children's early grammars, and that the results also provide support for the notion that children's generalizational biases shift from a semantic relational basis to a syntactic-structural basis some time between the preschool and early grammar school years.

In the present study, children's early ability to organise words into sentences was investigated using the Weird Word Order procedure with Spanish-speaking children. Spanish is a language that allows for more flexibility in the positions of subjects and objects, with respect to verbs, than other previously studied languages (English, French, and Japanese). As in prior studies (Abbot-Smith et al., 2001; Chang et al., 2009; Franck et al., 2011; Matthews et al., 2005, 2007), we manipulated the relative frequency of verbs in training sessions with two age groups (three- and four-year-old children). Results supported earlier findings with regard to frequency: children produced atypical word orders significantly more often with infrequent verbs than with frequent verbs. The findings from the present study support probabilistic learning models which allow higher levels of flexibility and, in turn, oppose hypotheses that defend early access to advanced grammatical knowledge.

The environmental context of verbs addressed by adults to young children is claimed to be uninformative regarding the verbs' meaning, yielding the Syntactic Bootstrapping Hypothesis that, for verb learning, full sentences are needed to demonstrate the semantic arguments of verbs. However, reanalysis of Gleitman's (1990) original data regarding input to a blind child revealed the context of single-word parental verbs to be more transparent than that of sentences. We tested the hypothesis that English-speaking children learn their early verbs from parents' single-word utterances. Distribution of single-word transitive verbs produced by a large sample of young children was strongly predicted by the relative token frequency of verbs in parental single-word utterances, but multiword sentences had no predictive value. Analysis of the interactive context showed that objects of verbs are retrievable by pragmatic inference, as is the meaning of the verbs. Single-word input appears optimal for learning an initial vocabulary of verbs.

The study analysed spectral and tongue shape dynamics of voiceless alveolar and postalveolar fricatives produced by ten children learning Scottish English. Synchronised ultrasound tongue imaging data and acoustic data were used to characterise children's productions of the phonemic contrast. Six children had consistently accurate productions of both fricative targets, with some cross-consonant phonetic differences in the direction previously demonstrated for older children and adults, as well as some immature acoustic and articulatory dynamic patterns. Instrumental analyses made it possible to describe tongue shape for phonemic errors and phonetically distorted realisations. There was some evidence of articulatory contrast in production preceding contrast in perception. The observed patterns can be explained by the complex articulatory demands on the fricative production, in combination with the developing control of articulators. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of the results for phonological theory and for speech therapy practice.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the acquisition of ditransitive structures beyond production. We conducted an elicitation task (production) and a picture-sentence matching task measuring accuracy and response times (comprehension). We examined German five-to seven-year-old typically developing children and an adult control group. Our data showed quasi-perfect performance in comprehension in adults and in those children who had already mastered ditransitives productively. However, children who had not yet mastered the production of ditransitives showed comprehension abilities preceding production abilities. Unlike adults, in the comprehension task children did not react explicitly before the end of the auditory stimulus.

Children’s exposure to talk about conceptual categories plays a powerful role in shaping their conceptual development. However, it remains unclear when parents begin to talk about categories with young children and whether such talk relates to children’s language skills. This study examines relations between parents’ talk about conceptual categories and infants’ expressive language development. Forty-seven parent-infant dyads were videotaped playing together at child age 10, 12, 14, and 16 months. Transcripts of interactions were analyzed to identify parents’ talk about conceptual categories. Children’s expressive language development was assessed at 18 months. Findings indicate that parents indeed talked about conceptual categories with infants and that talk was stable across time, with college-educated parents producing more than non-college-educated parents. Further, parents’ talk about conceptual categories between 10 and 16 months predicted children’s 18-month expressive language. This study sheds new light on mechanisms through which early experiences may support children’s language development.

The ability to compute non-adjacent regularities is key in the acquisition of a new language. In the domain of phonology/phonotactics, sensitivity to non-adjacent regularities between consonants has been found to appear between 7 and 10 months. The present study focuses on the emergence of a posterior–anterior (PA) bias, a regularity involving two non-adjacent vowels. Experiments 1 and 2 show that a preference for PA over AP (anterior–posterior) words emerges between 10 and 13 months in French-learning infants. Control experiments show that this bias cannot be explained by adjacent or positional preferences. The present study demonstrates that infants become sensitive to non-adjacent vocalic distributional regularities between 10 and 13 months, showing the existence of a delay for the acquisition of non-adjacent vocalic regularities compared to equivalent non-adjacent consonantal regularities. These results are consistent with the CV hypothesis, according to which consonants and vowels play different roles at different linguistic levels.

A description is given of the CHILDES/BIB database, its contents, and its relationship to the CHILDES database. CHILDES is a depository of child language corpora, and the publisher of CHAT (a transcription manual), and CLAN (an electronic package for child language research). CHILDES/BIB is an electronic bibliographic database that is an autonomous unit of CHILDES.