The aim of this study was to determine if mothers display identifiably different communicative styles in their interaction with their normally developing two- to five-year-old children. In order to investigate this issue an extensive coding system was developed, which assessed the structural organization and the communicative function of the speech of 71 mothers as they interacted with their children. By means of factor analysis three maternal communicative styles were distinguished: non-intervening, explaining and directing. In the non-intervening style there is no direct pressure from the mother on the child to respond verbally. The explaining mother is primarily concerned with providing information to her child in a way that gives the child little opportunity to take the speaking turn. The directing mother is mainly engaged in directing the child's behaviour by means of verbal control. The internal consistency of the three communicative styles appeared to be both satisfactory and related to relevant child and mother features.

We report a study of the acquisition of colour terms by Russian children which had two main aims: first, to test Berlin & Kay's (1969) theory of colour universals using acquisition order as a measure of basicness; and secondly, to see if the two blue terms of Russian are genuinely basic. Two hundred children aged from three to six-years-old were tested on three colour-tasks – colour term listing, colour term production and colour term comprehension. To a reasonable approximation, the order of colour term acquisition was in accord with Berlin & Kay's theory, but the data are also consistent with the weaker claim that primary terms tend to be learned before derived terms. On balance the data were consistent with Russian exceptionally, having an extra term for the blue region. But, the two blue terms – goluboj ‘light blue’ and sinij ‘dark blue’ – were confused more often than other pairs of terms even by the five- to six-year-old sample.

In a longitudinal investigation of 40 child–mother dyads, we examined prediction from three indexes of children's own language: (1) vocal imitations, (2) first spontaneous words in production, and (3) receptive language starting at 0;9, and their mothers' verbal responsiveness at 0;9 and 1;1, to the developmental onset of three significant language milestones of the second year: (1) 50 words in productive language, (2) combinatorial speech, and (3) the use of language to express a memory. In these analyses, we utilized EVENTS HISTORY ANALYSIS, a statistical technique well suited to questions concerning when in development certain events begin and the extent to which predictors influence the timing of those events. The timing of children's first words in production, the timing of their achievement of 50 words in receptive language, and maternal responsiveness at 1;1 each contributed uniquely to variation in the timing of the three language milestones. When child and mother factors were considered together, the onset of the three language milestones differed by as much as 0;5 months for children in the lower and upper 10th percentiles of the predictor variables. The present findings contribute to generating and testing specific models about child and mother factors thought to explain variation in key aspects of children's second-year language development.

Maternal infant-directed speech in Mandarin Chinese and Turkish (two mother–child dyads each; ages of children between 0;11 and 1;8) was examined to see if cues exist in input that might assist infants' assignment of words to lexical and functional item categories. Distributional, phonological, and acoustic measures were analysed. In each language, lexical and functional items (i.e. syllabic morphemes) differed significantly on numerous measures. Despite differences in mean values between categories, distributions of values typically displayed substantial overlap. However, simulations with self-organizing neural networks supported the conclusion that although individual dimensions had low cue validity, in each language multidimensional constellations of presyntactic cues are sufficient to guide assignment of words to rudimentary grammatical categories.

There is growing evidence that corrective input for grammatical errors is widely available to children (Farrar, 1992; Morgan, Bonamo & Travis, 1995). However, controversy still exists concerning the extent to which children can identify and exploit available negative input. In particular, very little is yet known about the longer-term effects of negative input. Performing a time series analysis on observational data, Morgan et al. (1995) conclude that corrective recasts are not related to future improvements in grammaticality. It is argued here, though, that the data sets analysed in this study are inherently ill-suited to the demands of time series analyses. The present study adopts an experimental approach in order to compare the effects of negative evidence versus positive input on the acquisition of irregular past tense verb forms. Twenty-six children (mean age 3;10) participated in a within-subjects design over a period of five weeks. It was found that improvements in the grammaticality of child speech were considerably greater in cases where negative evidence had been provided. Moreover, children's intuitions concerning the status of irregular and overregularized forms more closely approximated adult intuitions when corrective input was available.

In her inceptive study of promising, Astington (1988) found that five-year-olds failed to distinguish promises from predictions when judging story characters' utterances. Instead, their responses were based on whether the promised event had actually occurred. There is reason to believe, however, that the children's poor performance was an artefact of Astington's procedures. We tested this possibility with 32 children (mean age 5;8: range 5;7–6;2) by including several variations of Astington's procedures, but found no effects on the pattern of results. This suggests that Astington's findings are an accurate reflection of the developmental course of knowledge about promising.

According to the storage hypothesis (Kail & Leonard, 1986), word-finding deficits in young children are not the direct result of deficient retrieval strategies; they are a manifestation of a general delay in language development that affects lexical storage. In the current study, we explored one aspect of lexical storage, the hierarchical organization of the semantic system, in 13 preschoolers with word-finding deficits (WF) and 13 preschoolers with normal language abilities (ND), ranging in age from 3;3 to 6;7. The children named a series of objects at multiple levels of the noun hierarchy in response to contrast questions (e.g. for rose they were asked, ‘Is this an animal?’ to elicit plant [superordinate]; ‘Is this a tree?’ to elicit flower [basic]; ‘Is this a dandelion?’ to elicit rose [subordinate]). Both groups readily named at multiple levels, providing evidence of hierarchical organization of the lexicon. However, there were several differences between WF and ND groups that suggested that WF children did not have enough stored information to discriminate between similar semantic neighbours. We conclude (1) that hierarchical organization of the semantic lexicon is a robust developmental phenomenon, apparent in both ND and WF preschoolers and (2) that the word-finding deficits of preschoolers appear to reflect insufficient depth and breadth of storage elaboration rather than deficits in hierarchical semantic organization.

Review essay on: Goldberg, A. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. University of Chicago Press (1995). Pp. xi+265.

The cornerstone of traditional descriptive grammars is the construction: a recurrent pattern of linguistic elements that serves some well-defined communicative function. Prototypical constructions are sentence-level patterns such as, in English: the imperative, the ditransitive, the passive, the resultative, the yes–no question, and the cleft (each of which may have some subtypes). Also included in some theorists' definition of construction are components of sentences such as the prepositional phrase, the noun phrase, or the genitive noun phrase. Traditional constructions may have some specific words or morphemes associated with them (e.g. by in the full passive, 's in the genitive), but these are generally closed-class morphemes. Almost by definition, traditional constructions are relatively abstract patterns that apply across whole classes of open-class morphemes.

One of the defining features of modern-day generative grammar is the absence of constructions. Chomsky (1981) hypothesized that grammatical structure comprises two primary levels: the level of principles and parameters, which is much more abstract than constructions and includes everything from the subjacency constraint to the empty category principle, and the level of the lexicon, which includes all of the concrete morphemes and words of a particular language. In this view, constructions represent a ‘middle level’ of analysis that is, in effect, an epiphenomenon resulting from the interaction of the two primary levels. One outcome of this theoretical move has been that generative linguists concerned with construction-level phenomena have had to fill the generative lexicon with ever richer types of linguistic information, especially for verbs (e.g. Bresnan, 1982; Jackendoff, 1990; Levin, 1995; Pinker, 1989).

Tomasello's stimulating review of Goldberg's (1995) book, Constructions: a construction grammar approach to argument structure, raises several themes worthy of discussion. Tomasello suggests numerous reasons why functional and cognitive linguistic approaches in general, and Goldberg's approach in particular, are central to current work in child language. In my commentary I will summarize Tomasello's central claims about what he sees as significant about Goldberg's book, and I will raise the question of whether construction grammar – rather than any other cognitive or functional approach – is worth pursuing. While generally sympathetic to Goldberg's approach, I will discuss two issues that I think are worthy of further consideration in future research.

Tomasello highlights three very important reasons why he believes Goldberg's approach makes a significant contribution to child language research. First, he states that construction grammar provides a way of understanding language development as a whole, and not just particular aspects of language development, such as core grammar. Second, Tomasello characterizes Goldberg's approach as noteworthy because it provides a way of relating language development to other domains of human cognition. A third advantage, Tomasello claims, is that construction grammar allows for the view of language development as protracted (e.g. not instantaneous), something Tomasello suggests fits well with his own research findings (see Tomasello, 1992).

The commentators on this review raised many interesting and important points, and I am grateful to each of them for their time and their thoughtfulness. Each commentary deserves a thorough discussion of its own, but unfortunately, due to extreme limitations of space, I will have to focus here on what I see as the major points raised by one or more of them.