Pronoun case errors, or overextensions, like *me want it are characteristic of English child language. This paper explores a hypothesis that the morphological structure of a pronoun influences the pattern of these errors. The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) attempts to analyse English pronoun case forms into stems and affixes, but cannot because of their irregularity. Nevertheless the LAD extracts a phonetic core for each pronoun (e.g. /m-/ for the ist sg., /h-/ for the 3rd masc. sg.). The phonetic core blocks the overextension of suppletive nominative forms like I and she. This hypothesis predicts strong differences in the frequency and types of errors between pronouns with suppletive nominatives and those without. Evidence for this hypothesis was found in a transcript database of twelve children, with data collected in one hour samples every month from 1;0 to 3;0. 20,908 pronouns were examined, 1347 of which were errors. Statistical analyses of these data provide support for this hypothesis.

We report a study of the acquisition of colour terms by speakers of Setswana, the language of Botswana in Southern Africa. This was carried out as a test of Berlin & Kay's theory of colour term universals, on a language with less than the maximum complement of eleven basic colour terms, and in order to document changes in Setswana under the impact of economic development. Seventy-seven five- to nine-year-olds were studied on two colour tasks: elicited lists and colour naming. In general the data were consistent with Berlin & Kay's theory: the rank order of frequency of correct use of colour terms was similar to the order of the Berlin & Kay hierarchy; and primary colour terms were offered more frequently and were more likely to be used correctly than secondary colour terms. The use of English colour terms was prevalent, especially amongst the younger groups, but they functioned as substitutes for Setswana terms, rather than as a means to fill the vacant basic colour term slots.

What is the input to the mental System that computes inflected forms like walked, came, dogs, and men? Recent connectionist models feed a word's phonological features into a single network, allowing it to generalize both regular and irregular phonological patterns, like stop-stopped, step-stepped and fling-flung, cling-clung. But for adults, phonological input is insufficient: verbs derived from nouns like ring the city always have regular past tense forms (ringed), even if they are phonologically identical to irregular verbs (ring the bell). Similarly, nouns based on names, like two Mickey Mouses, and compounds based on possessing rather than being their root morpheme, such as two sabertooths, take regular plurals, even when they are homophonous with irregular nouns like mice and teeth. In four experiments, testing 70 three- to ten-year-old children, we found that children are sensitive to such nonphonological information: they were more likely to produce regular inflected forms for forms like to ring (‘to put a ring on’) and snaggletooth (a kind of animal doll with big teeth) than for their homophonous irregular counterparts, even when these counterparts were also extended in meaning. Children's inflectional Systems thus seem to be like adults': irregular forms are tied to the lexicon but regular forms are computed by a default rule, and words are represented as morphological tree structures reflecting their derivation from basic word roots. Such structures, which determine how novel complex words are derived and interpreted, also govern whether words with irregular sound patterns will be regularized: a word can be irregular only if its structure contains an irregular root in ‘head’ position, allowing the lexically stored irregular information to percolate up to apply to the word as a whole. In all other cases, the inflected form is computed by a default regular rule. This proposal fits the facts better than alternatives appealing to ambiguity reduction or semantic similarity to a word's central sense. The results, together with an analysis of adult speech to children, suggest that morphological structure and a distinction between mechanisms for regular and irregular inflection may be inherent to the design of children's language Systems.

An experimental study examined the comprehension of sentences containing concessive connectives, considered from an argumentative-conclusive point of view, in eight- and ten-year-old French children (24 subjects in each age group). Two tasks were used; subjects had to choose between (1) opposite preceding contexts of sentences (context choice task), and (2) conclusions that could be drawn from the same sentences (conclusion choice task). Results indicated a clear developmental increase in performance. For all concessive items, except mais (‘but’), results of the context choice task were better than results of the conclusion choice task. Older children gave significantly better responses for mais in the conclusion choice task. The ambivalence of the connective mais is discussed; comparisons with production and crosslinguistic data are suggested.

The purpose of this article is to provide a contemporary Government-and-Binding (GB) reinterpretation and evaluation of Klima & Bellugi's classic 1966 work on the acquisition of interrogatives. I argue that the central insight of K&B's paper can be captured by positing that wh- questions in Child English involve a wh-pronoun positioned in the head complementizer (C) position within the Complementizer Phrase (CP) (so blocking auxiliary inversion if this involves positioning an inverted auxiliary in C) and that in the transition to Adult English, children come to learn that wh-questions involve a wh-phrase superficially positioned in the specifier position within CP. I argue that the wh-in-C analysis poses both developmental problems (in that it fails to account for child structures involving a preposed wh-phrase with an uninverted auxiliary) and potential theoretical problems (in that long movement of a wh-head may violate locality principles). I then consider two alternative accounts of wh-questions which posit that wh-movement involves movement of a wh-phrase from the very earliest stages of development. The first of these is an adjunction account, on which wh-phrases are analysed as clausal adjuncts in Child English (adjoined to the Verb Phrase (VP) in the earliest stages and to the Inflection Phrase (IP) in later stages). I note, however, that this provides no principled account of the absence of auxiliary inversion in child wh-questions, and poses continuity problems (especially within a framework such as that of Cinque (1990) in which it is assumed that wh-phrases never adjoin to VP or IP). Finally, I consider an alternative account on which initial wh-phrases are analysed as occupying the specifier position within CP at all stages of development. I note that the problem posed by this analysis is accounting for the absence of auxiliary inversion in early wh-questions, and offer an account which posits that children overgeneralize specifier-head agreement from IP to CP.

This study investigated the form of infinitival sentences produced by young children and their knowledge of the control properties of this sentence form. Twenty-five children between the ages of 3;7 and 5;4 participated in a story completion task designed to elicit infinitive sentences and in an act-out comprehension task. Although the infinitive form was productive for even the youngest children in this study, development of this form was not complete even for the five-year-olds, nor did any child demonstrate adult knowledge of control. In addition, two competing claims regarding order of acquisition (that of Limber, 1973, and Hyams, 1985) were evaluated.

In this paper we investigate the development of interactive communication skills in 170 children aged seven to thirteen. Using a communication task that allows extended dialogues between pairs of young speakers, we are able to assess both the overall communicative success achieved by any pair; and from an analysis of the dialogues we can identify several interactive strategies that characterize older and more successful communicators. Successful communication involves the active involvement of both participants: asking and answering questions, volunteering information and responding sensitively to contributions from their partners. In contrast to the process of language acquisition, the development of these interactive skills takes place over an extended time period and subjects vary greatly in their ability to communicate effectively. For many analyses differences in the communicative success achieved by subjects differ more within than between age groups. For example, a substantial minority of our oldest subjects communicate no better than children six years younger

This paper explores the interface between syntax and pragmatics, focusing on the binding of pronouns and the pragmatics of the paradigms used to test this aspect of syntactic knowledge. Reinhart's (1986) version of Binding Theory (which accords a specific role to pragmatics in processes of pronoun resolution) and Sperber & Wilson's (1986) Theory of Relevance are used to examine the syntax and pragmatics of pronoun interpretation. A set of predictions based on Relevance Theory are evaluated against published results of tests of Binding Theory. The paper concludes that Relevance Theory provides a means of understanding constraints on testing syntactic knowledge and argues that pragmatic factors must be systematically controlled in any evaluation of syntactic knowledge.

Twenty-four infants were followed longitudinally from 1;2 to 1;10. Parents maintained diaries of the child's spoken words and at two-month intervals completed a representative checklist of words produced. There was good agreement across the two instruments and robust month-to-month correlations for both. However, the overall pattern of results suggests that the diary method is more effective during the early emergence of language and the representative checklist method is more effective late in the second year when vocabulary size becomes relatively large. Accurate longitudinal assessment of vocabulary may require a combination of the diary and checklist approaches.

Children aged 2;11 to 8;3 sang informally, once in the presence of their infant sibling and once when the infant was out of view. Paired excerpts from 22 children were presented to adult listeners, who were required to identify the infant-directed excerpt in each pair. Listeners' accuracy was above chance levels but below what would be expected for mothers' singing in comparable contexts. Children altered their singing style in the infant's presence by singing at a higher pitch level and with a different vocal quality.

This paper constitutes a response to Lust & Mazuka's (1989) defence of the Principal Branching Direction parameter and their critique of O'Grady, Suzuki-Wei & Cho's (1986) experiment, which purported to show that even children learning left-branching languages exhibit a preference for forward patterns of anaphora. Results of new experimental work with children learning Japanese are reported and shown to support the claim that there is a universal preference for forward patterns of anaphora in the early stages of language acquisition.