This paper lays out the components of a language acquisition model, the interconnections among the components, and the differing stances of nativism and empiricism about syntax. After demonstrating that parsimony cannot decide between the two stances, the paper analyzes nine examples of evidence that have been used to argue for or against nativism, concluding that most pieces of evidence are either irrelevant or suggest that language is special but need not invoke innate ideas. Two pieces of evidence – the development of home sign languages and the acquisition of Determiners – do show not just that language is special but that the child has innate syntactic content. The existential claim that nativism makes – there is at least one innate syntactic idea – is an easier claim to verify than the universal claim that empiricism makes – there are no innate syntactic ideas.

Links between young children's everyday use of mindful conversational skills and their success on laboratory tests of theory of mind understanding (ToM) were evaluated. Using published scales, teachers rated the conversational behavior and shyness of 129 children aged 60 to 101 months (M = 78·8 months) who were in their first years of primary school. The children also took batteries of first- and second-order false-belief tests along with tests of emotion understanding and general language ability. Correlational and regression analyses showed that performance on false-belief tests of ToM significantly predicted children's competence at reading others' minds in their everyday conversational interactions. Furthermore, these links transcended individual differences in language ability, shy personality, emotion understanding, and age. These findings augment and extend a growing body of evidence linking performance on laboratory ToM tests to socially competent real-world behavior.

Children understand gesture+speech combinations in which a deictic gesture adds new information to the accompanying speech by age 1;6 (Morford & Goldin-Meadow, 1992; ‘push’+point at ball). This study explores how early children understand gesture+speech combinations in which an iconic gesture conveys additional information not found in the accompanying speech (e.g., ‘read’+BOOK gesture). Our analysis of two- to four-year-old children's responses in a gesture+speech comprehension task showed that children grasp the meaning of iconic co-speech gestures by age three and continue to improve their understanding with age. Overall, our study highlights the important role gesture plays in language comprehension as children learn to unpack increasingly complex communications addressed to them at the early ages.

Adults distinguish sarcasm from literal language according to intonation involving a reduction in fundamental frequency (F0). We examined whether children's and adults' interpretation of a sarcastic speaker's belief, attitude, and humor was affected by degree of F0 reduction by presenting five- to six-year-olds and adults with sarcastic and literal criticisms with a small, medium, or large mean F0 reduction. Children and adults were more accurate in attributing the speaker's belief and intent for sarcastic criticisms for large F0 reductions compared to small reductions. These results show that F0 reduction is a helpful cue to sarcasm interpretation for both children and adults.

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.

The entry into language via first words and, the acquisition of word meanings is considered from the perspective of publications in the Journal of Child Language over the past forty years. Problems in achieving word meanings include the disparate and sparse concepts available to the child from past prelanguage experience. Variability in beginning word learning and in its progress along a number of dimensions suggests the problems that children may encounter, as well as the strategies and styles they adopt to make progress. Social context and adult practices are vitally involved in the success of this process. Whereas much headway has been made over the past decades, much remains to be revealed through dynamic systems theory and developmental semiotic analyses, as well as laboratory research aimed at social context conditions.

This study focuses on morphophonology and frequency in past tense production. It was assessed whether Dutch five- and seven-year-old typically developing (TD) children and eight-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) produce the correct allomorph in regular, irregular, and novel past tense formation. Type frequency of the allomorph, token frequency and phonotactic probability (PP) of the novel verb form are considered. The results showed all groups were sensitive to the phonological cue. PP did not contribute to past tense inflection of novel verbs in any of the groups, but type frequency did in all three groups. Only the seven-year-old typically developing children relied on token frequency for inflection of regulars. The findings point to an important role of phonology and frequency in past tense acquisition for both TD children and children with SLI. We discuss how the SLI performance pattern relates to theories on SLI.

Despite evidence that early narrative abilities are predictive of literacy skills and academic achievement, only limited progress has been made in understanding how the development of these narrative skills can be facilitated. The current study measured the effectiveness of a new narrative intervention conducted with 26 preschoolers. Children were assigned to one of two intervention conditions: an active-choice condition (able to choose story components) or a no-choice condition (story components were preselected). Both groups otherwise received the same explicit and engaging teaching of story grammar. As predicted, greater narrative skill gains were evident for the active-choice intervention; including larger gains on both central story grammar components and story information overall. Future implications for how stories might be presented to young children in order to more richly facilitate narrative skill acquisition are discussed.

Previous studies have shown that by 11 but not by 10 months infants recognize words that have become familiar from everyday life independently of the experimental setting. This study explored the ability of 10-, 11-, and 12-month-old infants to recognize familiar words in sentential context, without experimental training. The headturn preference procedure was used to contrast passages containing words likely to be familiar to the infants with passages containing words unlikely to have been previously heard. Two stimulus words were inserted near the beginning and end of each of a set of simple sentence frames. The ability to recognize the familiar words within sentences emerged only at 12 months of age. The contrast between segmentation abilities as they emerge as a result of everyday exposure to language, as assessed here, and those abilities as measured in studies in which words are experimentally trained is discussed in terms of memory-based mechanisms.

Recent research has highlighted several areas where pragmatics plays a central role in the process of acquiring a first language. In talking with their children, adults display their uses of language in each context, and offer extensive feedback on form, meaning, and usage, within their conversational exchanges. These interactions depend critically on joint attention, physical co-presence, and conversational co-presence – essential factors that help children assign meanings, establish reference, and add to common ground. For young children, getting their meaning across also depends on realizing language is conventional, that words contrast in meaning, and that they need to observe Grice's cooperative principle in conversation. Adults make use of the same pragmatic principles as they solicit repairs to what children say, and thereby offer feedback on both what the language is and how to use it.

In the early years of the Journal of Child Language, there was considerable disagreement about the role of language input or adult–child interaction in children's language acquisition. The view that quantity and quality of input to language-learning children is relevant to their language development has now become widely accepted as a principle guiding advice to parents and the design of early childhood education programs, even if it is not yet uncontested in the field of language development. The focus on variation in the language input to children acquires particular educational relevance when we consider variation in access to academic language – features of language particularly valued in school and related to success in reading and writing. Just as many children benefit from language environments that are intentionally designed to ensure adequate quantity and quality of input, even more probably need explicit instruction in the features of language that characterize its use for academic purposes