A speech act approach to the transition from pre-linguistic to linguistic communication is adopted in order to consider language in relation to behaviour generally and to allow for an emphasis on the USE of language rather than on its form. The structure of language is seen as non-arbitrary in that it reflects both attention structures (via predication) and action structures (via the fundamental case grammatical form of language). Linguistic concepts are first realized in action. A pilot study focusing on the regulation of JOINT attention and JOINT activity within the context of mutuality between mother and infant is discussed, with emphasis on ritualization in mutual play as a vehicle for understanding the development of the formal structures of language.

The arguments both for and against viewing the child's initial one-word utterances as HOLOPHRASES are reviewed. Some theoretical problems – concerning the innateness of language, the acquisition of syntax, the status of prosody and the child's comprehension of language during the one-word stage – with the holophrase controversy are pointed out. We suggest that an unresolvable theoretical stalemate exists because proponents on both sides of the controversy mistakenly assume the centrality of the notion sentence in discussing holophrases. An alternative view of early language development, which takes the SPEECH ACT as the basic unit of linguistic communication, is offered as a solution to the problems with the holophrase controversy as it now stands. We propose a more integrated description of the relations between functional and grammatical aspects of early communicative competence than is currently provided by sentence-oriented theories. In particular, we suggest that the child's PRAGMATIC INTENTIONS gradually become GRAMMATICALIZED as semantic and syntactic structures. Finally, three entities – communicative functions, referring expressions and predicating expressions – are proposed as LANGUAGE UNIVERSALS, as distinct from grammatical universals.

An investigation of children's ability to convey and respond to requests for action was based on the spontaneous speech of 36 dyads of nursery school children (3; 6–5; 7). Direct request forms (e.g. Give me the hammer) were frequent and the majority were acknowledged verbally. Examination of the contexts of direct requests indicated that speaker and addressee shared an understanding of the interpersonal meaning factors relevant to requesting. These meaning factors were invoked in justifying, refusing and in repeating or paraphrasing a request, and they also provided a basis for the communication of indirect requests. Examples of inferred requests are discussed, and a relationship between the structure of the speech act and conversational sequences is proposed.

This study examines the relative contributions of rote-memorization, analogic formation and rule-operation in the production of plurals by Hungarian children. In order to maximize analogic formations, each of fifteen actual roots was matched to a rhyming nonsense root. The elicited plural responses were characterized in terms of five stages of morphological learning. The importance of rule-operation as an explanation of word formation was evidenced by the fact that children producing responses characteristic of a given stage did not produce responses for later stages. The contribution of analogic formation was seen to be minimal and the effect of rote-memorization only somewhat greater.

The boundaries of many categories, and hence the boundaries between their names, are often vague (Lehrer 1970, Labov 1973). At the same time, the child who is just learning the denotation of a word often makes ‘mistakes’ and may over-extend words to include objects that do not belong to the adult category (e.g. Clark 1973). The present study is concerned with when children learn that boundaries are vague. It was hypothesized that children would first over-extend the use of terms such as cup and define the domain of denotation discretely on the basis of one or two perceptual factors, and only later would they learn that category boundaries are often vague because of the interdependence of physical and functional (i.e. cultural) properties. Children aged 3, 6, 9 and 12 years were asked to name and to sort twenty-five different drinking vessels; then they were asked for definitions of cup and glass and were also asked to choose the best exemplar present of each category. The results showed that children go through three stages. First, they over-extend the term cup. Next, they focus only on certain perceptual properties. Finally, they show growing awareness of functional properties and hence of the vagueness of the boundary between cups and glasses.

It was hypothesized that if young children could be taught the verbal cues used to elicit syntactic constructions from adults, children could respond just as adults do in terms of language performance. A series of stories was used to teach six 4- to 5-year-old children to identify objects as ‘nouns’, attributes of objects as ‘adjectives’, and actions as ‘verbs’. These form-class labels were then used as cues to request production of ANV (adjective-noun-verb) and ANVAN (adjective-noun-verb-adjective-noun) sentences. Though no child had produced this descriptive form during the pre-test, all children used such sentences in describing five post-test stories; responses in a control group showed that ANVAN sentences would not have been produced by prompting more elaborate description of the stories. All six children appeared to have well-formed semantic fields for nouns, adjectives and verbs.

The capacity to perceive similarity between apparently dissimilar domains is widely regarded as crucial to creative thought; yet little is known about the development of this ‘metaphoric’ skill. To assess children's capacities to effect appropriate ‘metaphoric links’, and to discriminate among metaphors of varying appropriateness, a task probing verbal metaphoric skill was designed. Subjects ranging in age from 4 to 19 years were required to complete a simile and then to choose from a set of four similes the one most appropriate for a given literary context. The study documented a tendency, increasing with age, towards preference for an appropriate metaphor. Whereas primary school children preferred non-metaphoric endings and preadolescents favoured conventional metaphors, high school and college students showed significant appreciation of appropriate metaphors. In contrast, conventional metaphors predominated in the subjects' productions and appropriate metaphors were rarely produced by subjects of any age group. Unexpectedly, the highest percentages of appropriate metaphors were produced by the youngest subjects and the oldest subjects. Where these two groups differed was in the proclivity of young subjects to produce metaphors which were highly original but inappropriate or nonsensical. The various strategies used by subjects of different ages are described and the relations between metaphoric productions and preferences are considered.

Three experiments with children between 5 and 7 years are described. It is shown that nominal predication of an unknown word by a superordinate term enables young children to make appropriate inferences concerning its attributes. The provision of distinguishing attributes also permits the child to differentiate the unfamiliar word from hyponyms of the superordinate. The results are discussed in relation to semantic development and reasoning in the young child.