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.

Like verbs, adjectives pose a challenge to the young word learner in that some – like red, round, rough, or rectangular – map onto properties that are detectable through the senses, while others – like ready, reasonable, or required – express abstract properties that have no reliable, physical correlate. Even for those adjectives whose properties are observable, how does a child know that one particular property is being highlighted above all others? The physical environment alone will not suffice. Just as with verbs, the child learning adjectives is faced with an inherent indeterminacy of meaning, which can only be resolved through the incorporation of cues originating from multiple sources.

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 Acquisition Of Complement Phrasal Constructions In Korean Is Examined In Spontaneous Speech Data From Two Children, Who Were Observed From One And A Half To Three Years Of Age. In Spite Of Typological Differences Between English And Korean, Both Syntactic And Semantic Characteristics are found to be shared by children acquiring complement constructions in the two languages. however, certain language-specific features of korean complement structures make it possible to address theoretical points concerning the structure of infinitival complements which cannot be resolved with the acquisition data on English. The error pattern in the acquisition of certain ‘subject-equi’ verbs in Korean poses problems both for LEG and GB accounts of the constituent structure of infinitival complements and the acquisition of those constructions. On the basis of the Korean data, I propose that base-generated VP complements are acquired first, with semantically motivated reanalysis of previously acquired infinitival complement structures occurring at a later stage.

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 surprising comprehension-production asymmetry in subject-verb (SV) agreement acquisition has been suggested in the literature, and recent research indicates that task-specific as well as language-specific features may contribute to this apparent asymmetry across languages. The present study investigates when during development children acquiring Mexican Spanish gain competence with 3rd-person SV agreement, testing production as well as comprehension in the same children aged between 3;6 and 5;7 years, and whether comprehension of SV agreement is modulated by the sentential position of the verb (i.e., medial vs. final position). Accuracy and sensitivity analyses show that comprehension performance correlates with SV agreement production abilities, and that comprehension of singular and plural third-person forms is not influenced by the sentential position of the agreement morpheme. Issues of the appropriate outcome measure and the role of structural familiarity in the development of abstract representations are discussed.

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.

What does the word chair mean? How does the category of objects bearing this name differ between adults and pre-school children? And how does the knowledge of a possible function of an object affect subjects' judgements? Answers to these questions were sought by means of sorting and rank ordering tasks. Subjects were shown drawings of a variety of objects on which one could sit, and were asked to indicate which ones they would call chairs. Those objects so judged to be category members were rank ordered for degree of typicality (or ‘best example’) by a paired-comparisons procedure. Half the subjects saw drawings of the objects alone, while the others saw a person sitting on each object. The results revealed that adults consistently judged some objects to be better examples than others, and that the provision of function information affected the judgements in a characteristic way. A different, less stable typicality structure was found in the children's category. Function cues caused the children's rank order judgements to change greatly. These findings are discussed within the framework of some recent theories of lexical concept formation in young children, and in relation to recent work on the nature of internal representations.

In a between-subjects design, 105 children aged 2; 5–5; 5 enacted their interpretation of passive and inverted cleft (IC) sentences in which animacy was systematically varied. Two agent strategies were found at 3;0: dynamic agent and word order. For ICs, the word order strategy persisted at 4;0, but the dynamic agent approach was replaced by an animate agent strategy. For passives, 4-year-olds mostly used structural relations, either regardless of agent and patient animacy (50 % of children), or only for animate patients (30% of children). The latter finding is discussed in terms of topicalization priorities.

An extensive fuzzy boundary was identified within the adult extension of two exemplary object-words, ‘dog’ and ‘ball’. The fuzzy boundaries were incorporated into the standard of adult extension against which the preschool child's use of ‘dog’ and ‘ball’ was compared, and the investigation provided a framework in which children's responses to fuzzy boundary referents could be accommodated. Responses to fuzzy boundary referents were considered as having precedents within adult extension and the data revealed the provision of precedents for a significant number of the young child's applications and non-applications of the words. The investigation concluded that, through adherence to an oversimplified concept of adult extension, previous research has underestimated the degree of correspondence that exists between child and adult extension.

Review essay on: B. MACWHINNEY (ed.), The emergence of language. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999.

An old joke that has been circulating for the past decade or so goes as follows: a biologist, a physicist, and a cognitive scientist were sitting around discussing the great achievements of their fields. The biologist waxed eloquent about the insights of Darwin's theory of evolution; the physicist expounded on the implications of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Then the cognitive scientist spoke up: ‘Our great discovery is the thermos. You put a cold drink in, the drink stays cold. You fill it with hot soup, the soup stays hot. This is amazing, for how does the thermos know?’

Obviously, this cognitive scientist has asked the wrong question about how the thermos maintains temperatures. In The emergence of language (henceforth, EL), an edited collection of chapters authored by an interdisciplinary group of computer scientists, linguists, and cognitive and developmental psychologists, it is suggested that perhaps language acquisition researchers have been making the same mistake as the errant cognitive scientist. To be sure, language is an extremely complex phenomenon, yet it is also elegant. Recognition of these characteristics in all aspects of language (thanks in large part to Chomskyan approaches to linguistics) highlights a well-known apparent paradox: language is hopelessly complex but children acquire it with ease. Solutions to this paradox have typically inspired researchers to posit rules or other kinds of blueprints – knowledge (innate or acquired) that children have to guide their language acquisition. But are these rules truly necessary? Perhaps children do not KNOW how to acquire language any more than a thermos knows how to maintain temperature.

Parent report data on 82 preschool children with complex neurodevelopmental disabilities including Down syndrome, dyspraxia, autism, and global developmental delay suggests communicative language use must reach a threshold level before vocabulary size becomes the best predictor of word combining. Using the Language Use Inventory and the MacArthur-Bates CDI (with sign vocabulary option), statistical modelling using regression trees and random forests suggests that, despite high linear correlations between variables, (1) pragmatic ability, particularly children's emerging ability to talk about things, themselves and others is a significantly better predictor of the earliest word combining than vocabulary size; and (2) vocabulary size becomes a better predictor of later word combining, once this pragmatic base has been established.

Previous studies across languages (English, Spanish, French) have argued that perceptual salience and cue reliability can explain cross-linguistic differences in early comprehension of verbal agreement. Here we tested this hypothesis further by investigating early comprehension in Greek, where markers have high salience and reliability (compared to Spanish and English) predicting early comprehension, as in French. We investigated two and three-year-old Greek-speaking children's ability to distinguish third person singular and plural agreement in a picture-selection task. We also examined the frequency of these morphemes in child-directed speech to address input effects. Results showed that three-year-olds are sensitive to both singular and plural agreement, earlier than children acquiring English and Spanish, but later than French, and despite singular agreement being more frequent than plural agreement in the child corpus. These findings provide further support for the role of salience and reliability during early acquisition, while highlighting a potential effect of morpheme position.