Two studies investigated syntactic productivity in three-year-old Mandarin speakers' use of verbs in the SVO and S"ba"OV constructions. In Study 1, children were taught novel verbs in one construction and assessed for their production in the other construction. Children produced verbs taught in the "ba" constructions in…

This article demonstrates how the Comparative Method can be applied to cross-linguistic research on language acquisition. The Comparative Method provides a systematic procedure for organizing and interpreting acquisition data from different languages. The Comparative Method controls for cross-linguistic differences at all levels of the grammar and…

This study investigates the emergence and development of the discourse-pragmatic functions of the Japanese subject markers "wa" and "ga" from a usage-based perspective (Tomasello, 2000). The use of each marker in longitudinal speech data for four Japanese children from 1;0 to 3;1 and their parents available in the CHILDES…

Most evidence concerning cross-linguistic variation in noun bias, the preponderance of nouns in early expressive lexicons (Gentner, 1982), has come from comparisons of monolingual children acquiring different languages. Such designs are susceptible to a number of potential confounders, including group differences in developmental level and…

Children look longer at a familiar object when presented with either correct pronunciations or small mispronunciations of consonants in the object's label, but not following larger mispronunciations. The current article examines whether children display a similar graded sensitivity to different degrees of mispronunciations of the vowels in…

Stoel-Gammon (this issue) provides a welcome addition to the phonological acquisition literature, bringing together insights from long-standing and more recent research to address the relationship between the developing phonological system and the developing lexicon. A growing literature on children's early use of words across languages and…

Previous research has examined children's ability to add inflections to nonsense words. The current experiments were designed to determine whether children, ranging in age from 1 ; 9 to 2 ; 10 (N=34), could demonstrate productivity by dropping verbal inflections. In, children added "-ed" and "-ing" to novel stems, and dropped them from novel…

The acquisition of reference involves both morphosyntax and pragmatics. This study investigates whether Dutch, English and French two- to three-year-old children differentiate in their use of determiners between non-specific/specific reference, newness/givenness in discourse and mutual/no mutual knowledge between interlocutors. A brief analysis of…

Relative importance of appearance and potential function in children's object naming was examined. First, 16 children, taught novel names for unfamiliar objects, had to decide whether these applied to items that resembled the training objects in appearance or potential function. Then the name training procedure was revised so that equal emphasis…

Tested the prediction that "yes-no" questions that place forms of the copula "be" in initial position will also increase the rate of growth of children's copula verb development. Data from 33 children who were matched for stage of language development at 1;9 and 2;0 confirm that the frequency of inverted copulas in yes-no…

The focus of this paper is the acquisition of the verb "eat." The transcripts of 40 children who were audiotaped monthly from 1;0 to 3;0, showed that "eat" was the first member of this verb class to be acquired. (16 references) (JL)

An experimental elicitation task with children between the ages of 20 and 27 months shows that children learning Thai numeral classifiers begin with purely distributional information: specifically (1) that classifiers must appear in the postnumeral position, and (2) that classifiers comprise a conventional, closed set of words. (35 references) (JL)

Vocabulary development of three children, aged 1;6 to 1;8, who had not yet begun to evidence a vocabulary spurt was followed to determine if these children would eventually have a vocabulary spurt. Results of the study are discussed in the context of the argument that a substantial proportion of children never evidence a vocabulary spurt. (JL)

Mental terms in mothers' and their childrens' speech at two and three years were studied to examine relationships between maternal and child use. Nineteen mother and child dyads were videotaped for 1 hour on each of 2 days when children were 2;0 and again for 2 1-hour sessions on separate days when they were 3;0. Mental terms were noted. (JL)

In this study, phonological similarity neighborhood sizes were calculated for expressive lexicon derived from 2 vocabulary lists representative of children aged 1;3 to 3;0. Over 80% of the words in these early lexicons had at least one phonological neighbor; nearly 20% had six or more phonological neighbors. (Contains 29 references.)