Examines the composition of the early productive vocabulary of eight Korean and eight English-learning children and the morpho-syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics of their caregivers' input in order to determine parallels between caregiver input and early lexical development. (Author/VWL)

This paper investigates the acquisition of compound vs. phrasal stress ("hot dog" vs. "hot dog") in English. This has previously been shown to be acquired quite late, in contrast to recent research showing that infants both perceive and prefer rhythmic patterns in their own language. Subjects (40 children in four groups the averages ages of which…

Investigates the reintroduction of referents in the "Frog Stories" told by Italian children, aged 4-10 (n=100). The study confirms that elementary school children are more competent than preschoolers in integrating the semantic content of the current utterance into the context generated by previous discourse.(Author/JL)

Evaluates the principle of laryngeal-supralaryngeal cyclicity by manipulating the domain cycle and phase relationship of the cycle as independent variables and by monitoring longitudinally the order of emergent phonemic distinctions in the sound systems of seven children with phonological delays as the dependent variable. Findings are discussed.…

Examines the CDI-WORDS Short Form vocabulary checklist as an index of language production. The study focuses on the associations between this short form and directly observed measures of lexical production; the associations between short-form checklists administered at different ages; the predictive associations between short form scores and…

Tests Pine & Lieven's (1993) suggestion that a lexically-based positional analysis can account for the structure of a considerable proportion of children's early multiword corpora. Results reveal that the positional analysis accounts for 60% of the children's multiword utterances and that most other utterances are defined as frozen. (33…

Naturalistic mother-child speech between autistic, Down's syndrome, or normal children and their mothers was studied to determine whether imitation facilitates grammar acquisition. Spontaneous utterances were longer and contained more advanced grammar than imitation utterances, indicating that imitation does not play a significant role in grammar…

Examined the development of Irish word order patterns. It was found that the 1.5- to 3-year-olds (N=3) studied used subject-initial utterances more frequently than adults in input, and that for both adults and children the elision of the verb "to be" had a significant role in the placement of subjects in the utterances. (42 references)…

A validation study of five checklists for assessing two-year-olds' word production revealed that the lists produced comparable mean production scores, reflected age differences, and preserved individual differences in total production and in production of linguistic categories such as nouns, verbs, open class items, and closed class items.…

Longitudinal observation of one- to three-year-olds' (N=2) acquisition of complement phrasal construction in Korean found that, in spite of typological differences between English and Korean, both syntactic and semantic characteristics were shared by children acquiring complement structure in the two languages. (Author/CB)

Describes a preschool child's gradual acquisition of a play language, Pig Latin, and discusses the abilities and errors that were measured over the course of acquisition. Acquisition improved as the subject developed language abilities involving word identification, first-consonant deletion, suffix creation, and short-term memory for speech units.…

Investigated overextensions in comprehension and production, using the preferential-looking model, in 99 children (ages 1;9 to 2;3) who were asked to find the referent that matched the label they were given in real and anomalous trials. Results confirm that overextensions in production are not diagnostic of children's underlying semantic…

This study examined adult and child word-initial voice onset time productions in English and Hindi to determine the age of acquisition of the phonemic voice contrast. Cross-linguistic differences in patterns of acquisition were found, but these were not necessarily traced to the different phonological systems. (JL)

Investigates how early a developing bilingual who is exposed simultaneously to English and Spanish can make appropriate language choices. Kept detailed records of the child's cumulative vocabulary from the first word at 10 months and on weekly audiovideo recording in both Spanish and English contexts from age 1-3. (Author/VWL)

Investigates the relationship between language comprehension and language production in Swedish children in a study carried out longitudinally with 10 children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 10 children with unimpaired language development. Results indicate that the relationship between comprehension and production is different at…