Two-year-olds learn language quickly but how they exploit adult input remains obscure. Twenty-nine children aged 2;6 to 3;2, divided into three treatment groups, participated in an intervention experiment consisting of four sessions 1 week apart. Pre- and post-intervention sessions were identical for all children: children heard a wh-question and attempted to repeat it; a ‘talking bear’ answered. That same format was used for the two intervention sessions for children in a quasicontrol condition (Group QC). Children receiving modelling (Group M) heard a question twice before repeating it; those receiving implicit correction (Group IC) heard a question, attempted to repeat it, and heard it again. All groups improved in supplying and inverting an auxiliary for target questions with trained auxiliaries. Only experimental children generalized to auxiliaries on which they had not been trained. Very little input, if concentrated but varied, and presented so that the child attends to it and attempts to parse it, is sufficient for the rapid extraction and generalization of syntactic regularities. Children can learn even more efficiently than has been thought.

This study was designed to examine factors associated with literal interpretations of homonyms. Participants were 212 second graders, ages 7;0–8;11, who listened to a story containing 16 key words. The key words were homonymous words (‘pseudo-homonyms’), nonsense words, or familiar words used accurately. While listening to the story, children selected an illustration of each key word. Later, they were asked to recall the key words and to justify their picture selections. There was no association between interpretation and recall accuracy for nonsense words or familiar words used accurately; however, children who accurately recalled a homonymous key word were more likely to interpret the homonym ‘literally,’ relative to children who failed to recall the key word. Yet most of the children who correctly interpreted the pseudo-homonyms also correctly interpreted these key words. Most children correctly recalled the story context regardless of key word type, but whereas correct recall of context predicted accurate interpretation of nonsense words and familiar words used accurately, it did not do so for homonyms. Children made equivalent numbers of literal and accurate interpretations of homonyms, even when correctly recalling context. Children's justifications for their word interpretations implicated the role of metacognitive skills, particularly in terms of selective attention, as a factor influencing homonym interpretation.

Parents frequently check up on what their children mean. They often do this by reformulating with a side sequence or an embedded correction what they think their children said. These reformulations effectively provide children with the conventional form for that meaning. Since the child's utterance and the adult reformulation differ while the intended meanings are the same, children infer that adults are offering a correction. In this way, reformulations identify the locus of any error, and hence the error itself. Analyses of longitudinal data from five children between 2;0 and 4;0 (three acquiring English and two acquiring French) show that (a) adults reformulate their children's erroneous utterances and do so significantly more often than they replay or repeat error-free utterances; (b) their rates of reformulation are similar across error-types (phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic) in both languages; (c) they reformulate significantly more often to younger children, who make more errors. Evidence that children attend to reformulations comes from four measures: (a) their explicit repeats of corrected elements in their next turn; (b) their acknowledgements (yeah or uh-huh) as a preface to their next turn; (c) repeats of any new information included in the reformulation; and (d) their explicit rejections of reformulations where the adult has misunderstood. Adult reformulations, then, offer children an important source of information about how to correct errors in the course of acquisition.

This study examined the distribution of two Hebrew nominal structures – N–N compounds and denominal adjectives – in spoken and written texts of two genres produced by 90 native-speaking participants in three age groups: eleven/twelve-year-olds (6th graders), sixteen/seventeen-year-olds (11th graders), and adults. The two constructions are later linguistic acquisitions, part of the profound lexical and syntactic changes that occur in language development during the school years. They are investigated in the context of learning how modality (speech vs. writing) and genre (biographical vs. expository texts) affect the production of continuous discourse.

Participants were asked to speak and write about two topics, one biographical, describing the life of a public figure or of a friend; and another, expository, discussing one of ten topics such as the cinema, cats, or higher academic studies. N–N compounding was found to be the main device of complex subcategorization in Hebrew discourse, unrelated to genre. Denominal adjectives are a secondary subcategorizing device emerging only during the late teen years, a linguistic resource untapped until very late, more restricted to specific text types than N–N compounding, and characteristic of expository writing. Written texts were found to be denser than spoken texts lexically and syntactically as measured by number of novel N–N compounds and denominal adjectives per clause, and in older age groups this difference was found to be more pronounced. The paper contributes to our understanding of how the syntax/lexicon interface changes with age, modality and genre in the context of later language acquisition.

Verbs of agency denote relations between behavioural and mental states. Thus, ‘Jim is looking for X’ goes beyond a behavioural description, to take a mentalistic construal whereby Jim's desire for success, and his beliefs about how to search, explain his observed actions. Greek has two verbs of agency that can be used somewhat interchangeably by adults to mean ‘to look for’. The hypothesis is that young children will obey the principle of contrast to diagnose that one verb is mentalistic and the other verb is to be construed behaviourally. Following a study of mothers' verb-use, two studies with 238 children aged three to five years confirmed that the verb preferred in home use gave below-chance performance on a false-belief test whilst the less-established verb gave above-chance success, with children giving appropriate justifications. Thus, Greek preschoolers seem sometimes to have an adult-type understanding and sometimes fail to match the adult understanding. The proposal is that the children initially convert an adult verb-use pragmatic difference into a semantic contrast.

Eisenberg (2002) presents data from an experiment investigating three- and four-year-old children's comprehension of restrictive relative clauses (RC). From the results she argues, contrary to Hamburger & Crain (1982), that children do not have discourse knowledge of the felicity conditions of RCs before acquiring the syntax of relativization. This note evaluates this conclusion on the basis of the methodology used, and proposes that an account of syntactic development needs to be sensitive to the real-time processing requirements acquisition places on the learner.

Three experiments investigated the role of oppositional predicate dimensionality in four- and five-year-old children's processing of negation. In Experiment 1 children (37 four-year-olds, mean age 4;8, and 20 five-year-olds, mean age 5;9) were asked to produce opposites for common terms (e.g. ‘big’). In Experiment 2 children (27 four-year-olds, mean age 4;8; 23 five-year-olds, mean age 5;9) were asked to make pictures corresponding to statements phrased as negations (e.g. The arrow is NOT pointing up). In Experiment 3, children were asked to evaluate a series of pictures made by ‘another child’ using materials and procedures similar to those used in Experiment 2. Preschool children made use of predicate dimensionality when producing negations but could accurately evaluate truth-values regardless of content. Children often recalled negated items as affirmations (usually corresponding to antipodal opposites), which suggests that children's use of predicate dimensionality contributes to non-classical processing.

Thirty-six three- to four-year-old children were tested to assess whether hearing a word-referent link from an ignorant speaker affected children's abilities to subsequently link the same word with an alternative referent offered by another speaker. In the principal experimental conditions, children first heard either an ignorant or a knowledgeable speaker link a novel word with one of three toys. The first speaker's labelling episode was followed by a second in which a different speaker used the same novel label but for a different toy. There was also a Base-line condition which was the same as the experimental condition involving the ignorant speaker except that she did not associate the novel label with a referent. When tested for comprehension of the novel label, children selected the FIRST speaker's toy at high levels when the first speaker was knowledgeable, but selected the SECOND speaker's toy when the first speaker was ignorant. These findings suggest that children's experience with the ignorant speaker did not affect their abilities to learn a subsequently presented alternative word-referent link. These findings are discussed in terms of understanding the mechanisms by which children adapt their word-learning in line with speakers' knowledge states.

In this study I examine Venezuelan children's developing abilities to use evaluative language in fictional and personal narratives. The questions addressed are: (1) How does the use of evaluative language vary in fictional and personal narratives? (2) Is there a relationship between the use of evaluative language in these two narrative genres and children's age and socio-economic status (SES)? The sample consists of 444 narratives produced by 113 Venezuelan school-age children participating in 4 narrative tasks, in which personal and fictional stories were elicited. Findings suggest that age and socio-economic status have a greater impact on the use of evaluation in fictional stories than in personal narratives. Low SES and younger children are at a greater disadvantage when performing fictional narratives than when performing personal narratives. These results strongly imply that children's narrative competence cannot be assessed in a single story-telling task, given the importance that task-related factors seem to have on narrative abilities.

Structural analyses of developing lexicons have provided evidence for both children's holistic lexical representations and sensitivity to phonetic segments. In the present investigation, neighbourhood analyses of two children's (age 3;6) expressive lexicons, maternal input, and an adult lexicon were conducted. In addition to raw counts and frequency-weighted counts, neighbourhood size was calculated as the proportion of the lexicon to which each target word is similar, to normalize for vocabulary size differences. These analyses revealed that children's lexicons contain more similar sounding words than previous analyses indicated. Further, neighbourhoods appear denser earlier in development relative to vocabulary size, presumably because children first learn words with more frequent sounds and sound combinations. Neighbourhood density as a proportion of the size of the lexicon then decreases over development as children acquire words with less frequent sounds and sound combinations. These findings suggest that positing fundamentally different lexical representations for children may be premature.

This study investigated young children's ability to use narrative contexts to infer the meanings of novel vocabulary items. Two groups of 15 seven- to eight-year olds participated: children with normally developing reading comprehension skill and children with weak reading comprehension skill. The children read short stories containing a novel word and were required to produce a meaning for the novel word, both before and after its useful defining context. The proximity of the novel word to this context was manipulated. The results supported the hypothesis that children with weak reading comprehension skills are impaired in their ability to integrate information within a text, particularly when that information is non-adjacent and the processing demands are, therefore, high. Analysis of the error data revealed a similar pattern of types of errors for both groups: children with poor reading comprehension were not more likely to produce a thematically inappropriate response than their skilled peers.

Phonological awareness skills are critical for reading acquisition, yet relatively little is known about the origins of phonological awareness. This study investigates one plausible source of the emergence of phonological awareness, phonological neighbourhood density. As vocabulary grows, the number of similar-sounding words in the child's mental lexicon increases. This could create developmental pressure to develop awareness of sub-units within words such as syllables, rhymes and phonemes. If this is the case, then neighbourhood density effects should be discernible in phonological awareness tasks. Children should be more successful in these tasks with words from dense phonological neighbourhoods, as they should show greater awareness of sub-units within these words. We investigated this hypothesis in a group of 48 five-year-old children, most of whom were pre-readers. The five-year-olds with a high vocabulary age showed neighbourhood density effects in a rhyme oddity task, but five-year-olds with lower vocabulary ages did not. This suggests that vocabulary acquisition and consequent neighbourhood density effects are indeed one source of the emergence of phonological awareness skills in pre-readers.

Van Valin (Journal of Child Language29, 2002, 161–75) presents a critique of Rowland & Pine (Journal of Child Language27, 2000, 157–81) and argues that the wh-question data from Adam (in Brown, A first language, Cambridge, MA, 1973) cannot be explained in terms of input frequencies as we suggest. Instead, he suggests that the data can be more successfully accounted for in terms of Role and Reference Grammar. In this note we re-examine the pattern of inversion and uninversion in Adam's wh-questions and argue that the RRG explanation cannot account for some of the developmental facts it was designed to explain.

Gender agreement elicitation was used with Russian children to examine how diminutives common in Russian child-directed speech affect gender learning. Forty-six children (2;9–4;8) were shown pictures of familiar and of novel animals and asked to describe them after hearing their names, which all contained regular morphophonological cues to masculine or feminine gender. Half were presented as simplex (e.g. jozh ‘porcupine’) and half as diminutive forms (e.g. jozhik ‘porcupine-DIM’). Children produced fewer agreement errors for diminutive than for simplex nouns, indicating that the regularizing features of diminutives enhance gender categorization. The study demonstrates how features of child-directed speech can facilitate language learning.

Twenty-four caregivers and their two- to four-year-old children took part in a storybook reading task in which caregivers taught children novel labels (‘DAXY’) for familiar objects. One group (N=12) received labels modelled syntactically as proper names (‘This is NAMED DAXY’), and another group (N=12) received the same labels for the same objects modelled syntactically as adjectives (‘This is VERY DAXY’). Caregivers took strikingly different approaches to teaching words from the two lexical categories. In teaching proper names, but not adjectives, caregivers flagged cases in which one word was paired with two objects; two words were paired with one object; and one word was paired with an inanimate object. In teaching adjectives, but not proper names, caregivers discussed meaning and offered translations. Caregivers' distinctive strategies for teaching proper names and adjectives are congruent with recent findings about children's word meaning assumptions, and with analyses of the semantics of these lexical categories. The findings indicate that parental speech could provide a rich source of information to children in learning how different lexical categories are expressed in their native language.

Parent report data on early language development measured using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (CDI–Infant Form) was collected on 134 preschool children with autism spectrum disorder. The pattern of development of understanding of phrases, word comprehension and expression, and production of gestures, was compared to the typical pattern. In common with typical development there was considerable variability in language acquisition, although for the group as a whole this was significantly delayed compared to the normal course. In addition, atypical patterns were identified in the emergence of language skills in the sample. Comprehension of words was delayed in comparison to word production, and production of early gestures (involving sharing reference) was delayed relative to production of later gestures (involving use of objects). However, other aspects of language development were similar to that found in typically developing infants, including word comprehension being in advance of word production in absolute terms, gesture production acting as a ‘bridge’ between word comprehension and word production and the broad pattern of acquisition across word categories and word forms. The implications for assessment and intervention with preschool children with autism spectrum disorder are discussed.