A study of two- to six-year-olds' spontaneous uses of "from" to mark oblique agents showed that, while the two-year-olds produced "from" for agents and "with" for instruments in imitation, older subjects shifted to "by" for agents and kept "from" to mark locative sources. (Author/CB)

Two studies investigated developmental changes, and inter-linguistic and inter-individual variations, in the expansion and composition of young French children's early lexicons. Results indicated that lexical productivity strongly increased with age, whereas lexical diversity showed little developmental progression. Inter-individual variability in…

Measurement of voice onset time productions associated with three bilabial, three alveolar, and two velar stops in 3- to 7-year-olds and adults indicated that, by five years of age, children have acquired all voicing contrasts; however, not all sounds are produced in an adult-like manner. (Author/CB)

Analysis of the use of the connective "but" by 3- to 9-year-olds indicated that all most commonly used the word to signal semantic relationships and for pragmatic functions. Younger children most frequently used "but" when causal or precausal relationships existed, and older children used "but" more to encode complex contrast. (Author/CB)

Investigates expression of part-whole semantic relation by children 3 to 12 years old and indicates that older children prefer its use significantly more often. The part-whole semantic relation was also observed to take several linguistic forms, such as partitive, spatial, and possessive. Age, experimental task format, or type of experimental…

Two studies were conducted, one to judge the relative ages of pairs of vocalizations from Chinese and American infants of varying ages, the other to judge the linguistic community of the vocalizer when age was held constant. Judgments were highly accurate in the first study, but not in the second. (Author/RM)

Sensitivity to differences in lexical stress was studied in monolingual French-, German-, and Swedish-speaking four- and five-year-olds. For most discriminations the older children performed better, but for a trisyllabic discrimination not found in French, the older children performed less well, supporting an attunement theory of language…

Examined the distribution of two Hebrew nominal structures in spoken and written texts of two genres produced by 90 native-speaking participants. Written texts were found to be denser than spoken texts lexically and syntactically as measured by a number of novel N-N compounds and denominal adjectives per clause; in older age groups this difference…

Examined how Italian day-care teachers (N=5) spoke to young children and adjusted their language according to age and size of groups. It was found that teachers made both structural and functional modifications of language according to childrens' ages and the size of groups, with group size exerting a greater influence on the features of the…

Three mother-child dyads were videotaped in a free play setting when children were two- and three-years old. Children's spontaneous comprehensible utterances were rated for grammaticality and ambiguity of function, and mothers' responses were noted. (Contains 14 references.) (Author)

Data from 48 infants revealed (1) that infants aged 1;2-2;3 failed to establish a stable word-object link even in follow-in labeling and (2) that only infants aged 1;6-1;7 could identify the correct referent during discrepant labeling. During the period between 1;2-1;7 infants are becoming increasingly adept at acquiring new labels under minimal…

Examined the role of animacy and pronouns as children ages 2 to 3 years acquired transitive construction. Participants learned two nonce verbs, one of which was modeled in several transitive sentence frames and the other in neutral sentence frames. Many children produced transitive sentences with the first verb, but only children near age 3…

Ability to distinguish "ask" and "tell" in Spanish was studied with five groups of native Spanish speakers: adults, 7- and 10-year-olds in a full bilingual school and 7- and 10-year-olds in a non-total bilingual school. Increased age, bilingual schooling and presence of contextual clues enhanced performance. (CHK)

Examination of the types of linguistic knowledge that affect three- to nine-year-olds' (N=60) and adults' (N=12) ability to understand and produce novel compounds in Hebrew revealed that comprehension was achieved ahead of production. Knowledge of morphological form had little effect on comprehension, but was crucial to production. (Author/CB)

Investigates young children's ability to adjust the content of their verbal responses according to what they know their listener knows. Younger and older three-year-old children were able to discern what another person knew and did not know and adjusted their responses accordingly. Younger three-year-olds tended to be underinformative. (SED)