Some authors have suggested that definitional skills include metalinguistic components (Watson, 1985; Snow, 1990; McGhee-Bidlack, 1991). The present study therefore empirically investigated relations between the ability to define words and level of metalinguistic awareness in 280 Italian children (with ages ranging from 5 to 11 years) and in two…

The development of the use of the third-person singular -s in open syllable verbs in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and their typically developing peers was examined. Verbs that included overt productions of the third-person singular -s morpheme (e.g. "Bobby plays ball everyday;" "Bear laughs when mommy buys…

Eighteen-month-olds' spatial categorization was tested when hearing a novel spatial word. Infants formed an abstract categorical representation of support (i.e., placing 1 object on another) when hearing a novel spatial particle during habituation but not when viewing the events in silence. Infants with a productive spatial vocabulary did not…

Mental-content verbs such as "think," "believe," "imagine" and "hope" seem to pose special problems for the young language learner. One possible explanation for these difficulties is that the concepts that these verbs express are hard to grasp and therefore their acquisition must await relevant conceptual development. According to a different,…

In our recent paper, "Semantic generality, input frequency and the acquisition of syntax" ("Journal of Child Language" 31, 61-99), we presented data from two-year-old children to examine the question of whether the semantic generality of verbs contributed to their ease and stage of acquisition over and above the effects of their typically high…

Children are able to take multiple perspectives in talking about entities and events. But the nature of children's sensitivities to the complex patterns of perspective-taking in adult language is unknown. We examine perspective-taking in four- and six-year-old Tamil-speaking children describing placement events, as reflected in the use of a…

One of the most influential recent accounts of pronoun case-marking errors in young children's speech is Schutze & Wexler's (1996) Agreement/Tense Omission Model (ATOM). The ATOM predicts that the rate of agreeing verbs with non-nominative subjects will be so low that such errors can be reasonably disregarded as noise in the data. The present…

Effects of negative input for 13 categories of grammatical error were assessed in a longitudinal study of naturalistic adult-child discourse. Two-hour samples of conversational interaction were obtained at two points in time, separated by a lag of 12 weeks, for 12 children (mean age 2;0 at the start). The data were interpreted within the framework…

This study was designed to simultaneously investigate the influence of phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness skills on the ability to spell inflected verbs in structured spelling tasks. Children in grades 1, 2, and 3 (n = 103) spelled inflected past and progressive tense verbs and completed awareness tasks. Developmental changes…

When English-speaking two-year-olds begin producing polysyllabic words, they often omit unstressed syllables that precede syllables with primary stress (Allen & Hawkins, 1980; Klein, 1981; Gerken, 1994a). One proposed mechanism for these omissions is that children omit syllables at a phonological level, due to prosodic constraints that act on…

In the current debate about the abstractness of children's early grammatical knowledge, Tomasello & Abbott-Smith (2002) have suggested that children might first develop "weak" or "partial" representations of abstract syntactic structures. This paper attempts to characterize these structures by comparing the development of constructions around…

One of the tasks of language learning is the discovery of the intricate division of labour between the lexical-semantic content of an expression and the pragmatic inferences the expression can be used to convey. Here we investigate experimentally the development of the semantics-pragmatics interface, focusing on Greek-speaking five-year-olds'…

The study explored early syntactic development, and tested the hypothesis that children use similarity of meaning in order to move beyond the learning of individual item-based multiword constructions. The first 6 types of verb-object (VO) constructions in Hebrew-speaking children were analysed for the occurrence of transfer of learning and…

The spontaneous utterances produced by 492 Cantonese-speaking children aged 36-60 months in 30-minute toy play contexts were collected. The incidence and percentage of different lexical classes, the ratio of noun and verb types and tokens were calculated. A statistically significant predominance of verb usage was found in the expressive utterances…

Theorists of language acquisition have long debated the means by which children learn the argument structure of verbs (e.g. Bowerman, 1974, 1990; Pinker, 1984, 1989; Tomasello, 1992). Central to this controversy has been the possible role of verb semantics, especially in learning which verbs undergo dative-shift alternation in languages like…