This article reports on a study designed to obtain data on the first words understood and produced by eight infants. It provides a descriptive account of the earliest levels of language comprehension and allows comparison of lexical development in comprehension and production. (Author/CFM)

Examined children's generalization of familiar verbs to novel events. Findings reveal children aged 1;8 with the largest expressive vocabulary generalized the same verbs to actions with different agents, but not to actions different in outcome or manner of action and children aged 2;2 extended familiar action verbs to other actions different in…

Assesses verb phrase development in three Trinidadian children in which Standard English and Trinidad Creole coexist. Adverbials were found to be crucial in delineating specific areas of semantic intent. (20 references) (GLR)

Investigated adult and three- and five-year-old children's use of verb inflections to guide their initial mapping of verb meanings in two studies that explored use of the -ing and -ed verb inflections during mapping of novel verb meanings. Results are applied to implications for early verb learning and the use of the bootstrapping construct in…

Looks at naturalistic samples of adult-to-child speech to determine whether variations in the input are consistent with reported variations in the proportions of nouns and verbs in children's early vocabularies. Naturalistic speech samples from English-, Italian-, and Mandarin-speaking children and their caregivers were examined. (Author/JL)

Examined how rules for interpreting empty category (EC) subjects of complement clauses vary crosslinguistically across structural and lexical dimensions. Twenty-three Greek-speaking 4- and 5-year-olds and 10 adults, 29 Spanish-speaking 4- and 5-year-olds, 18 6- and 7-year-olds, and 8 adults took part in act-out experiments. Results indicate an…

Examines the development of children's understanding of the difference between "want" and "need" in two different experiments. The first experiment required the children to respond verbally in choosing between the two concepts; the second required them to give an object to one of two characters who had made a request using…

Many recent generativist models attribute grammatical knowledge to young children on the basis that children's language patterns the same way as the target adult language. It has been proposed that the child acquires this knowledge early on in development by a process of parameter setting. Wexler (1996) presents the "Very Early Parameter Setting…

Variations in the amount and nature of early language to which children are exposed have been linked to their subsequent ability (e.g. Huttenlocher, Haight, Bryk, Seltzer & Lyons, 1991; Hart & Risley, 1995). In three computational simulations, we explore how differences in linguistic experience can explain differences in word learning ability due…

Three studies assessing language comprehension of infants and toddlers through a method requiring a minimum of motor movement, no speech production, and differential visual fixation of two simultaneously presented video events provide insight into children's emerging linguistic capabilities and help resolve controversies about language production…

Offers additional means of evaluating parent speech by examining frequencies of individual nouns, verbs, and descriptors, and examining the learning task presented to children. Study one examines transcripts from the CHILDES database of English-speaking parents' speech to children at five developmental levels; study two examines 50 transcripts of…

The present study investigates the performance of 96 Cantonese-speaking three- to five-year-old preschoolers on three false belief tasks--a deceptive object, a change of location, and an unexpected contents task encompassing a variety of task factors. Most importantly, the research examines the possibility that false belief performance depends on…

Investigation of use of stative, process, punctual, and non-punctual verbs by a child acquiring Japanese as a first language found that sampled present progressive verb forms occurred with process verbs while these forms were never used with stative verbs. Most omissions of present progressive forms occurred with the early use of "mixed"…

Reports an experimental investigation of the influence of linguistic factors on linguistic performance. The factors studied were interpretive complexity and surface length. Results show an interaction between types of linguistic complexity and type of linguistic performance. (Author/SED)

Examines the spontaneous speech of Portuguese-speaking two-year olds in natural conversation with Portuguese-speaking adults. The children were separated into three groups based on Mean Length of Utterance in Words (MLUW). The children in the highest-MLUW group almost perfectly matched the adult speakers on every measure. (37 references)…