A perceptual study was conducted in order to determine (I) whether a group of mothers could recognize their own infant on the basis of tape-recorded cry samples obtained under three cry-evoking situations, and (2) whether an infant's sex could be correctly identified simply by listening to cry samples. The results of this study indicated that mothers could recognize the cry of their own infant with few instances of confusion and that the sex of an unknown infant cannot be reliably identified using a simple auditory identification paradigm.

A speech act approach to the transition from pre-linguistic to linguistic communication is adopted in order to consider language in relation to behaviour generally and to allow for an emphasis on the USE of language rather than on its form. The structure of language is seen as non-arbitrary in that it reflects both attention structures (via predication) and action structures (via the fundamental case grammatical form of language). Linguistic concepts are first realized in action. A pilot study focusing on the regulation of JOINT attention and JOINT activity within the context of mutuality between mother and infant is discussed, with emphasis on ritualization in mutual play as a vehicle for understanding the development of the formal structures of language.

Vocalizations of two female infants, recorded between one and eight weeks of age, were studied. The vocalizations were classified as cry, discomfort and vegetative sounds. Five examples of each sound type were selected randomly from the output of both infants and at each of three age levels (90 vocalizations in all). No changes in features were noted as a result of increasing age. The two infants showed individual feature patterns for all sound types; however, for both infants, certain features were found to be highly typical of cry and discomfort sounds, and certain others of vegetative sounds. The implications for later speech development are discussed.

The arguments both for and against viewing the child's initial one-word utterances as HOLOPHRASES are reviewed. Some theoretical problems – concerning the innateness of language, the acquisition of syntax, the status of prosody and the child's comprehension of language during the one-word stage – with the holophrase controversy are pointed out. We suggest that an unresolvable theoretical stalemate exists because proponents on both sides of the controversy mistakenly assume the centrality of the notion sentence in discussing holophrases. An alternative view of early language development, which takes the SPEECH ACT as the basic unit of linguistic communication, is offered as a solution to the problems with the holophrase controversy as it now stands. We propose a more integrated description of the relations between functional and grammatical aspects of early communicative competence than is currently provided by sentence-oriented theories. In particular, we suggest that the child's PRAGMATIC INTENTIONS gradually become GRAMMATICALIZED as semantic and syntactic structures. Finally, three entities – communicative functions, referring expressions and predicating expressions – are proposed as LANGUAGE UNIVERSALS, as distinct from grammatical universals.

Voice onset time (VOT) characteristics of stops in initial clusters in American English words produced by children and adults were studied. Words were spoken in isolation and in sentence context by eleven three-and four-year-old children, and by a male and female adult. Spectrograms were made and VOT duration measurements taken. Three experienced listeners transcribed the isolated words and sentences. Analyses showed that overall timing characteristics were similar for children and adults. Speakers differed in their [±voice] boundary and there was no absolute time distinction between [±voice] stops; [+voice] stops showed less variability than [−voice]. VOT generally increased from labial to dental to velar clusters, and was shorter in sentence context and longer in clusters than in singletons. Children's VOT averages were generally, but not significantly, longer than adults' in all contexts, and coarticulation constraints affected the accuracy with which children produced the stop and liquid portion of a particular cluster.

An investigation of children's ability to convey and respond to requests for action was based on the spontaneous speech of 36 dyads of nursery school children (3; 6–5; 7). Direct request forms (e.g. Give me the hammer) were frequent and the majority were acknowledged verbally. Examination of the contexts of direct requests indicated that speaker and addressee shared an understanding of the interpersonal meaning factors relevant to requesting. These meaning factors were invoked in justifying, refusing and in repeating or paraphrasing a request, and they also provided a basis for the communication of indirect requests. Examples of inferred requests are discussed, and a relationship between the structure of the speech act and conversational sequences is proposed.

This paper describes, through discussion and illustrative events, an evolving segment of communication during the course of transition of one child's total communication system from the sensorimotor or gestural level at 12 months into the level of use of the adult words more and mine, and their associated multi-morphemic utterances, at 24 months. The descriptive analysis is based on detailed narrative records of the child's vocal and gestural communication, abstracted from videotape recordings of his behaviour in 10 playsessions conducted at regular intervals and under similar conditions, and which included the presence of the mother, peers, other adults, and play materials. The results as presented provide a case study of the evolutionary processes leading up to the acquisition of words and eventually sentences, illustrating as precisely as possible the texture of one of the earliest developmental sequences.

This study examines the relative contributions of rote-memorization, analogic formation and rule-operation in the production of plurals by Hungarian children. In order to maximize analogic formations, each of fifteen actual roots was matched to a rhyming nonsense root. The elicited plural responses were characterized in terms of five stages of morphological learning. The importance of rule-operation as an explanation of word formation was evidenced by the fact that children producing responses characteristic of a given stage did not produce responses for later stages. The contribution of analogic formation was seen to be minimal and the effect of rote-memorization only somewhat greater.

This note attempts to clarify the early acquisition of the interrogative system, with data from Serbo-Croatian. The subject is approached from an angle that has hitherto not received sufficient treatment: adult-child interaction in direct communication. The process of question acquisition was observed in a first-born pair of dizygotic twins – a girl, Jasmina, and a boy, Danko – between I; I and 3; 0, the observation beginning a month prior to the time when the children first began to produce questions. The material was transcribed during weekly two-hour sessions in the home of the subjects.

The boundaries of many categories, and hence the boundaries between their names, are often vague (Lehrer 1970, Labov 1973). At the same time, the child who is just learning the denotation of a word often makes ‘mistakes’ and may over-extend words to include objects that do not belong to the adult category (e.g. Clark 1973). The present study is concerned with when children learn that boundaries are vague. It was hypothesized that children would first over-extend the use of terms such as cup and define the domain of denotation discretely on the basis of one or two perceptual factors, and only later would they learn that category boundaries are often vague because of the interdependence of physical and functional (i.e. cultural) properties. Children aged 3, 6, 9 and 12 years were asked to name and to sort twenty-five different drinking vessels; then they were asked for definitions of cup and glass and were also asked to choose the best exemplar present of each category. The results showed that children go through three stages. First, they over-extend the term cup. Next, they focus only on certain perceptual properties. Finally, they show growing awareness of functional properties and hence of the vagueness of the boundary between cups and glasses.

A set of sentences written in either an expanded or optionally deleted form were read for imitation and delayed recall to a group of nursery school children. A similar set of sentences had been presented for recall to adults. The older children and adults tended to recall the sentences in deleted forms, regardless of their input form. The youngest child tested, however, recalled the sentences in a fully expanded form, even when they had been presented and imitated in deleted form. The results offer support for the hypothesis of memory for non-linguistic ideas by both children and adults, as well as a demonstration of Slobin's (1973) universal operating principle that when children are first gaining control of an optionally deletable linguistic entity, they will often produce only its full form.

It was hypothesized that if young children could be taught the verbal cues used to elicit syntactic constructions from adults, children could respond just as adults do in terms of language performance. A series of stories was used to teach six 4- to 5-year-old children to identify objects as ‘nouns’, attributes of objects as ‘adjectives’, and actions as ‘verbs’. These form-class labels were then used as cues to request production of ANV (adjective-noun-verb) and ANVAN (adjective-noun-verb-adjective-noun) sentences. Though no child had produced this descriptive form during the pre-test, all children used such sentences in describing five post-test stories; responses in a control group showed that ANVAN sentences would not have been produced by prompting more elaborate description of the stories. All six children appeared to have well-formed semantic fields for nouns, adjectives and verbs.

The capacity to perceive similarity between apparently dissimilar domains is widely regarded as crucial to creative thought; yet little is known about the development of this ‘metaphoric’ skill. To assess children's capacities to effect appropriate ‘metaphoric links’, and to discriminate among metaphors of varying appropriateness, a task probing verbal metaphoric skill was designed. Subjects ranging in age from 4 to 19 years were required to complete a simile and then to choose from a set of four similes the one most appropriate for a given literary context. The study documented a tendency, increasing with age, towards preference for an appropriate metaphor. Whereas primary school children preferred non-metaphoric endings and preadolescents favoured conventional metaphors, high school and college students showed significant appreciation of appropriate metaphors. In contrast, conventional metaphors predominated in the subjects' productions and appropriate metaphors were rarely produced by subjects of any age group. Unexpectedly, the highest percentages of appropriate metaphors were produced by the youngest subjects and the oldest subjects. Where these two groups differed was in the proclivity of young subjects to produce metaphors which were highly original but inappropriate or nonsensical. The various strategies used by subjects of different ages are described and the relations between metaphoric productions and preferences are considered.

Fifty-four children aged between 3 and 6 were asked questions such as ‘Which box is Xer than it is Z?,’ where Xer was taller, shorter, fatter, or thinner and Z was tall or fat, in the context of five rectangles of varying dimensions. For most questions, the largest rectangle was chosen most often as an answer, regardless of the adjectives used. The older children often chose the Xest rectangle in the array, indicating interpretation of only the first clause of the question. After providing feedback on incorrect answers for the five-year-old children, a post-test showed a decrease in frequency of choices of the largest rectangle, no change in frequency of choices of the Xest rectangle, and, for some questions, an increase in the frequency of choices of the correct rectangle. The results are interpreted to mean that the linguistic strategy of attending to the first clause is more resistant to change than the more primitive non-linguistic preference for choosing the largest object without interpreting the sentence.

Two-, three-, and four-year-old children were tested on a variation of Wason's (1965) procedure for testing the effects of plausibility on the comprehension of negative statements. It was found that negatives about an exceptional item in an array, i.e. plausible negatives, were understood before implausible negatives. Reaction time data revealed that plausible negatives were also processed more rapidly for three- and four-year-olds. An additional effect on plausibility, namely the degree of confusability between the different items in an array, was proposed, and was found to become increasingly salient with age.

Three experiments with children between 5 and 7 years are described. It is shown that nominal predication of an unknown word by a superordinate term enables young children to make appropriate inferences concerning its attributes. The provision of distinguishing attributes also permits the child to differentiate the unfamiliar word from hyponyms of the superordinate. The results are discussed in relation to semantic development and reasoning in the young child.