Discusses a study that examines which combination of animate and inanimate actors (anyone or anything performing an action) and patients (the thing that is the object of action) two-year-olds view as prototypical. Results suggest that the actor category is usually acquired first for prototypical sentences with animate actors and inanimate…

Describes a study that investigates the order of acquisition of case-marked pronouns in Hebrew among 105 children between two and five years of age. Results indicate that children begin using case-marked pronouns as early as age two and that the stage of morphological development parallels that of English-speaking children. (SED)

Discusses two studies that examine whether children are sensitive to the fact that adjectives and nouns differ in the contrast they imply. Results show that by age four, children are sensitive to this. Implications for children's use of referential language and word learning strategies are discussed. (SED)

Describes a study that analyzes the naturalistic productions of "because" and "so" by 96 children, aged three-and-a-half to nine-and-a-half years of age, while narrating personal events. Analyzes results in terms of such factors as: correctness, types of causality, nature of actor/recipient, time of causality, producer, and linguistic issues. (SED)

In three experiments, a multiple habituation paradigm was used to examine the ability of 7- and 9-month-old prelinguistic infants to form a natural, basic-level object category. Findings constitute independent evidence for the existence of a linguistically relevant nonlinguistic category prior to the onset of word comprehension. (SED)

Describes a study which compared the effects of three types of adult feedback (acceptance, correction with joint labelling, and correction with explanation) on young children's inappropriate word usage. Findings showed that correction with explanation was more effective than correction with joint labelling, which was more effective than simple…

Findings include (1) comprehension of 'this,''that,''here,' and 'there' depends on the role the comprehender plays in the conversation and (2) 'this' and 'here' are more difficult to comprehend that 'that' and 'there.' (EKN)

Argues that knowing how infants process speech is a prerequisite to any definition of linguistic experience and therefore, the discrimination paradigm does not provide a test for the effect of experience on infants' speech discrimination. Outlines conditions to be met in order to conclude an effect of experience. (EKN)

Investigates in an experimental setting the claim that young children have some knowledge of the rules of correspondence between language and reality which are central to propositional logic. (EKN)

The relationship of object permanence and classification skills to receptive and expressive language development was investigated in infants. Object permanence, classification, and parent-child verbal interaction ratings were about equally related to language comprehension functioning, while permanence was more strongly related to language…

Research results indicated that children were able to use information from a number of sources in interpreting commands in which the relational terms were replaced by nonsense. Linguistic and nonlinguistic context and prior repetition presented constraints to children's responses. (Author/JB)

Reports results of a longitudinal study testing the acquisition of restrictions of the use of pronouns in children, first as 9 year olds and later as 11 year olds. (AM)

The role of a strategy of reduplication in phonological acquisition and behavior was examined in terms of: (1) the relationship between adoption of this strategy and failure to produce nonreduplicated multisyllabic forms and final consonants, and (2) the role of reduplication in production constraints. (Author/AM)

Thirty children with a mean length of utterance ranging from 1.00 to 4 and an age range of 1.7 to 5.5 were tested for comprehension of two-noun possessive phrases. Three types of possessive relationships were used to uncover children's knowledge of the semantics and syntax of English possession. (Author/AM)

This article discusses a study designed to ascertain the comprehension of the role of "because" in a sentence in children between the ages of 5;8 and 10;11. (CFM)