This study examined the evolution of visual perspective-taking skills in relation to the comprehension and production of first, second and third person pronouns. Twelve French-speaking and 12 English-speaking children were observed longitudinally from 1;6 until they had acquired all pronouns and succeeded on all tasks. Free-play sessions and three tasks were used to test pronominal competence. Four other tasks assessed Level-1 perspective-taking skills: two of these tasks required the capacity to consider two visual perspectives, and two others tested the capacity to coordinate three such perspectives. The results indicated that children's performance on perspective-taking tasks was correlated with full pronoun acquisition. Moreover, competence at coordinating two visual perspectives preceded the full mastery of first and second person pronouns, and competence at coordinating three perspectives preceded the full mastery of third person pronouns when a strict criterion was adopted. However, with less stringent criteria, the sequence from perspective taking to pronoun acquisition varied either slightly or considerably. These findings are discussed in the light of the ‘specificity hypothesis’ concerning the links between cognition and language, and also in the context of the recent body of research on the child's developing theory of mind.

Children's narratives consist of event clauses and contextualizing or ‘evaluative’ clauses. Bamberg & Damrad-Frye (1991) and Bamberg (1994) claimed that young children make limited use of evaluative clauses because they are less able to adopt a global perspective on the narrative. In an earlier study, Karmiloff-Smith (1985) demonstrated that the narratives of younger children have coherence only at a local level. However, Wellman & Bartsch (1988) showed that young children could produce evaluative-like causal explanations if given a specific prompt. The present study on 160 young children aged five, seven, nine and eleven years examined their production of evaluatives in narratives of a story presented as a video sequence with no spoken dialogue, to ensure that the children's production was not simply a re-working of verbal input. Results indicated that prompts greatly facilitated children's production of evaluatives and that they could adopt a global perspective on the story when formulating evaluatives.

These results indicate that limitations in the narratives of young children are more plausibly explained by contextual factors influencing language production and by constraints on working memory than by children's presumed lack of understanding of the structure of events or their inferences about the minds of the characters.

The aim of this study is to determine universal vs. language-specific aspects of children's ability to organize cohesive anaphoric relations in discourse. Analyses examine narratives produced on the basis of two picture sequences by subjects of four ages (preschoolers, seven-year-olds, ten-year-olds, adults) in four languages: English (n = 80), German (n = 40), French (n = 40), and Mandarin Chinese (n = 40). Particular attention is placed on the impact of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors in determining the uses of referring expressions and of word order in the maintenance of reference to the animate characters. Although subjecthood and agency determine NP position within the clause, role relations in discourse coreference account for NP form in all languages, notwithstanding some variations across languages, ages, and referents (e.g. density of coreference, null elements vs. overt pronouns, clause structures). It is concluded that the development of anaphora is determined by universal pragmatic principles and by language-specific properties characterizing how languages map discourse-internal and sentence-internal functions onto the same forms.

Expressive vocabulary data gathered during a systematic diary study of one male child's early language development are compared to data that would have resulted from longitudinal administration of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories spoken vocabulary checklist (CDI). Comparisons are made for (1) the number of words at monthly intervals (9;10.15 to 2;0.15), (2) proportion of words by lexical class (i.e. noun, predicate, closed class, ‘other’), (3) growth curves. The CDI underestimates the number of words in the diary study, with the underestimation increasing as vocabulary size increases. The proportion of diary study words appearing on the CDI differed as a function of lexical class. Finally, despite the differences in vocabulary size, logistic curves proved to be the best fitting model to characterize vocabulary development as measured by both the diary study and the CDI. Implications for the longitudinal use of the CDI are discussed.

Six children were studied from the age of 0;6 to 1;6 in order to chart their developing comprehension vocabularies from the first to the 100th word. Observational data were used in the first instance to identify newly comprehended words and then controlled testing was carried out for each word to confirm and expand the observational data. Comprehension of words was divided into four categories – object names, context-bound object words, action words and personal names. The relative frequency of the different categories of word was found to change with the size of the comprehension vocabulary as personal names decreased in importance and both object names and action words became increasingly more common. There was considerable variation among the six children especially in the proportion of object names and action words that they understood but vocabulary composition became highly stable between 60 and 100 words.

The ability to justify one's beliefs or actions requires linguistic, social, and cognitive skills, including an understanding of the psychological states of others and the negotiation of a socially-sensitive discourse. The production of verbal justifications was examined both quantitatively and qualitatively in eight pairs of eight- to eleven-year-old children whose natural discourse was videotaped, transcribed and coded for justifications. Previous research has frequently studied justifications in conflicts; children in this study produced most of their justifications both in the context of elaborating on a previously asserted claim and in conflicts. The statement justified and the justifications themselves most frequently focused on facts, evaluations, actions, and habitual characteristics or occurrences. A majority of the justifications were produced to support a statement which had some negative valence to it. Although causal connectives have previously been often used as the means for determining justifications, the children in this study rarely used causal connectives and mental verbs in statements with justifications. A qualitative analysis of the discourse of the dyads revealed differences in conversational styles which produced very different types of justifications. Some dyads made frequent use of narratives and co-constructed justifications; other dyads generally produced very short, often isolated justifications.

Rispoli (1998) presents data to motivate a model of pronoun case errors in child English. His data consist of relative rates of occurrence of errors involving particular forms in the study of twenty-seven English children between the ages of 2;6 and 4;0. I show that his claim that overextensions of he and him are antagonistic cannot be maintained. I argue that his explanation for why her subjects are more frequent than other errors is insufficient, and suggest an account in terms of relative input frequencies. Finally, I demonstrate that the fundamental assumption underlying Rispoli's model is untenable, and that his findings are not counterevidence for developmental syntax models such as that of Schütze (1997).

In this case study we investigate how early a developing bilingual exposed simultaneously to English and Spanish can make appropriate language choices. We propose two methodological requirements for studies of this kind: (1) detailed records of the development of the child's lexicon; and (2) data collection in more than one language context. Our own study relies on detailed records of the child's cumulative vocabulary from the first word at ten months, and on weekly audiovideo recordings in both English and Spanish contexts from age 1;3. Analysis of the data shows a strong tendency for the language of the child's utterances to match that of the context at ages 1;7–1;8.

APPARENT CONTRADICTIONS, e.g. Did Susan like her supper? – Yes and no, involve asserting and denying the same proposition. They therefore violate the classical LAW OF NON-CONTRADICTION, suggesting the use of non-classical INTERPRETIVE STRUCTURES in natural language and reasoning. Experiment 1 explores the range of such interpretive structures available to adults (n = 24) in their reasoning about an apparent contradiction. Experiment 2 uses a similar task to study the emergence of these interpretive structures in young children's reasoning (3;6 to 8;4, n = 48). Results suggest an early facility with resolution strategies relating to OBJECT STRUCTURE (as in, Maybe Susan liked one part of supper but didn't like another part) and an initial tendency to focus on the negative by referring to it first (as in, Maybe Susan didn't like one part of supper but did like another part). We discuss the results in terms of the NATURAL LOGIC of objects and their properties, and the LOGICAL RESOURCES available to young children.

Review essay on: ELMAN, J., BATES, E., JOHNSON, M., KARMILOFF-SMITH, A., PARISI, D. & PLUNKETT, K. Rethinking innateness: a connectionist perspective on development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (1996). Pp. 447.

I believe that the field of developmental psycholinguistics suffers from two major weaknesses. The first is its impressionistic and inexact formulations. The second is its divisive polarizations. One can see the reasons for the first weakness. Developmental psycholinguistics is only about 30 years old (ignoring diary studies which preceded the linguistic and cognitive surge of the sixties). But speculation and hypothesizing on the basis of relatively little data and passing acquaintance with phenomena has reached the level of customary ‘business as usual’. We are skilful at hypothesis construction, yet we are regretfully delinquent at formulating clear tests of our hypotheses. We are fond of conjecture about causal relationships, but our empirical tests progress no further than weak forms of correlation.

With regard to our second major weakness, our knack for polarizing opinion regarding chimerical questions such as the innateness of language can also be understood. After all, are we not following the classical dialectic model of thesis, antithesis and eventual synthesis? I think this is an idealized view of ourselves. In fact, we are driven by hunch and bias far more often than we would like to admit. Following hunches may be a real sign of creativity and vitality in our thinking. However, polarization driven by biases is ultimately detrimental. At some point we must disentangle ourselves from customary dialogue and transcend our deeply rutted patterns of thought.

When I began Rethinking innateness, I had hoped that the book might help us overcome these two weaknesses. I believe that it contributes positively to the goal of increasing the precision of our hypotheses and their empirical substantiation. At the same time, I am afraid that it will have a negative impact by aggravating the degree of polarization in our field.

In his review of Rethinking innateness (Elman, Bates, Johnson, Karmiloff-Smith, Parisi & Plunkett, 1996; henceforth, RI), Rispoli (this volume) comments favourably on the dynamical change models presented in RI's Chapter 4. I think a more critical stance is warranted. In particular, I will argue that dynamical change models cannot in principle make reference to mental representation, that the models are stipulative, and that they fail as descriptions of behaviour. (For more extensive discussion, see Valian, in press.) The relation between dynamical change models and connectionist networks is not spelled out in RI, so it is not clear which of the criticisms that I direct at dynamical change models also hold for connectionist models.