Analysis of narratives produced spontaneously within natural conversation by children from three to five years of age found age-related increases in length, number, variety, compression, and complexity of six story elements, remoteness of narrated events, and number and variety of intra- and post-narrative listener responses made to them. These and other changes indicate a considerable growth from three to five in the amount and sophistication of information furnished by preschool narrators, particularly between three and four years, as well as in the motivation of the stories with respect to the overall conversational discourse.

The purposes of the present study was to develop a multiple-choice test of figurative language comprehension and to evaluate the development of such comprehension over a wide range of ages and children. To do this, samples of novel and frozen figures were selected from a corpus provided by elementary school children and then administered to 149 different children between 9 and 14 years. Results showed that the test produced was a reliable one, and one that produced meaningful developmental trends. In addition, differences were noted between the comprehension and production of novel and frozen figures of speech. These findings were discussed in terms of their methodological and developmental implications.

Ten objects were used to assess comprehension, production, and imitation of comparative and superlative suffixes in 100 children ranging in age from 2; 6 to 4; 6. The results indicated that comprehension of both suffix forms was similar at each of five age levels studied; although incrementally better comprehension scores occurred with succeeding ages. Virtually all subjects were successful in imitating forms missed during the comprehension task. Analysis revealed that the -er suffix was produced more often than the -est suffix, at the youngest age (2; 6): at succeeding age levels this difference was reversed. Big was the primary lexical unit selected by the subjects for positive and negative polar forms connoting size; little was the second most frequently used adjective form.

Developmental changes in verbal responses to systematic variations in linguistic contexts contrast with the data reported in the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift studies. The present study indicates a protracted developmental shift extending from five years of age beyond nine years of age. Apparently the first priority is to create a linguistic context when none is given; once a linguistic context is realized, semantic-syntactic equivalences have priority, followed by differentiation and then integration.

Judges were asked to identify the sex of prepubertal children by listening to their tape-recorded voices. More incorrect guesses were made of working class girls than of their male counterparts. For middle-class children, however, the pattern was reversed, with more boys being misidentified as girls than the opposite. These findings are related to work demonstrating an association between masculinity and working-class speech, and to the ‘covert prestige’ attaching to such speech as a result. Some practical implications of the results for researchers in the field of child language are also discussed.

This study was concerned with the question of how linguistic input of the social environment might affect children's acquisition of word meaning. It was argued that the conceptual impact of linguistic input could be demonstrated where the conceptual components underlying word meaning are not primarily based on perceptual categories, as in the case of kinship terms. In two experiments, 84 German children living in families, and 84 orphans, aged from 6 to 10, were compared in their ability to use natural or artificial kinship names as terms for kinship relations. The results suggested that a mere familiarity interpretation for the actual difference in the ability to use kinship terms could be ruled out. Orphans showed a specific conceptual deficit in handling relational components even when the familiarity of the terms was equated for the two groups. Two issues these results raise are whether the orphans' deficit will disappear with increasing age, and to what extent the correct use of kinship terms is due to differences in general intelligence.

The ability of children between the ages of 2; 0 and 4; 8 to produce locative pre- or postpositions was investigated in English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, and Turkish. Across languages, there was a general order of development: (1) ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘under’, and ‘beside’, (2) ‘between’, ‘back’ and ‘front’ with featured objects, (3) ‘back’ and ‘front’ with non-featured objects. This order of development is discussed in terms of nonlinguistic growth in conceptual ability. Language-specific differences in the general pattern of development are discussed in terms of a number of linguistic factors which may facilitate or retard the child's discovery of the linguistic means for encoding concepts.

The use of locative prepositions by Hebrew-speaking children aged 2; 0–3; 0, was investigated in a cross-sectional study. Thirty kibbutz children served as subjects. The spontaneous utterances of each child were analyzed and scored for the frequency with which the child supplied obligatory contexts for locative expressions as well as for appropriate use. The findings suggest the following order of acquisition: be- ‘in’; le- ‘to’; le+ pronominal suffixes ‘to’ (dative); al ‘on’; le ‘to’ (directional); mi- ‘from’; al-yad ‘beside’; meaxorey ‘behind’; mitaxat le- ‘under’. The role of formal linguistic complexity in determining that order is discussed. Special reference is made to the contrast between enclitic prefix prepositions and separate word prepositions that express the same locative notions.

Two branches of language functioning are now actively being studied: one focuses on language as a system for expressing syntactic-semantic relations, the other as a system of interpersonal communication. In this paper, a case is presented of a child who at 3; 3 showed a marked schism between these two areas. In the former domain he displayed behaviour that in most respects was age appropriate and relatively extensive. In the latter domain, he displayed almost totally ineffective functioning. His difficulties in the use of language for communication were mirrored from infancy by a serious failure either to understand or produce non-verbal communication (e.g. gestures). It is suggested that the structural and communicative aspects of language are based upon different sets of skills which particularly in cases of language disorder may function independently of one another.

The data obtained in two investigations (one a longitudinal/cross-sectional naturalistic study, the other a quasi-experimental study) demonstrate that preschool age children have the capacity for hypothetical reference. However, the data also indicate that this capacity for hypothetical reference operates within certain constraints, particularly early in the preschool years. Specifically, future hypothetical reference is an earlier acquisition than past hypothetical reference; reference to single hypothetical events appears sometime prior to reference to sequences of hypothetical events; and accuracy is better in self-initiated than other-initiated hypothetical reference. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Sentences were constructed in which the terms before and after were embedded in logically constrained and logically reversible sequences. As in French & Brown (1977), pre-school children found the constrained sentences easier to comprehend. These findings add a new dimension to Clark's (1971) original before and after study in which the effect of logically constrained sentences was not considered. The results of the two studies are consistent with a growing literature (including current formulations of semantic feature theory) which implicates contextual cues and child strategies in the comprehension process, and raises questions about the role of parental speech in the child's comprehension of temporal terms.