The effect of both geometric and extra-geometric factors on children's production of "in" is reported (free-response paradigm). Eighty children across four age groups (means 4;1, 5;5, 6;1, and 7;1) were shown video scenes of puppets placing real objects in various positions with reference to a bowl and a plate. Located objects were placed at three…

The acquisition of German plurals has been the focus of controversy in the last decade. In this paper we claim that degree of productivity (i.e. the capacity of nouns to form potential plurals) plays a key role in determining pace of acquisition. A plural elicitation task was administered to 84 Viennese German-speaking children aged 2;6 to 6;0.…

Discusses results of a study of good and poor third-grade readers that indicates that difficulties with phonetic representation could underlie the inferior sentence comprehension of poor beginning readers. In addition, the finding that these children place greater reliance on immature processing strategies raised further possibility that tempo of…

Examines children's responses to verbal instructions to place objects in, on, or under other objects according to the paradigm developed by Clark (1973). Also assesses children's comprehension of the spatial terms by asking them simply to point to objects in particular relationships without actually manipulating them. (SED)

Defines criteria to identify children's language overextensions and investigates how young children in the early stages of language acquisition rename objects analogically during a standardized play situation. Results indicate that analogic extensions are well within the capabilities of children from one year, eight months to two years, four…

Describes one child's early productions of lexical primary stress, using as a framework the following questions: (1) Is conventional stress used consistently? (2) Are there other alternatives for the placement of primary stress? (3) Does stress assignment appear to be random? (4) Does stress assignment appear to vary with spontaneous vs. imitative…

Examined effects of direct intervention on language learning. Using a toy manipulation task, 18 children aged 3;6 to 4;6 were systematically taught linguistic structures beyond their developmental grasp. Solid improvement was found in the experimental conditions; no significant improvement was noted in control conditions, showing that the language…

Evidence supporting two roles of imitation in language acquisition was found in a single child's speech studied at ages 2.8 and 3.0. Imitation can serve to limit the language environment's complexity, and forms may appear in imitations before appearing in spontaneous speech. Use of "what?" is given as an example. (MSE)

Examines children's errors in interpreting 'ask' as 'tell' in the framework of pragmatic development. Results indicate that if the children do not know the information, they relay the question, i.e., 'ask.' If they do know the answer, they supply it, i.e., 'tell.' (EKN)

Young children were found to overextend and underextend newly uttered but previously understood words. The data are discussed in terms of differences between children's and adult's word meanings and between comprehension and production. (Author)

Research with young Hebrew-speaking children revealed a development in linguistic control of the system of verb-pattern alternation from nonalternation to near mastery, with the concepts of causativity and distinctions in transitivity being lexicalized earlier than others. (Author)

Two studies examining children's understanding of three terms denoting different degrees of likelihood showed that, while preschoolers showed little comprehension of the adverbs' meanings, by fourth grade, most children could distinguish between them. Children understood the distinction between "definitely" and the other two terms better than the…

Provides an experimental validation of Landau and Gleitman's (1985) syntactic bootstrapping procedure on how children may use syntactic information to learn new verbs. The children's choice of the correct referent for a given verb versus a nonsense verb in two syntactic structures is explained. (37 references) (GLR)

Examines narrative telling by children, and the transition in development from the capability of talking in the "here and now" to the capability of telling about the "there and then." Seemingly, very young children can produce narratives in an unscaffolded context to adults unfamiliar with these experiences. (23 references) (GLR)

The evolution of young children's categories, as measured by category name production, was studied. Results indicated that four sequences of category evolution were found, formed by the intersection of two factors: overlap vs. mutual exclusivity and first re-assignment separate vs. first re-assignment joint. (26 references) (Author/CB)