Two experiments were performed on the ability of children and adults to understand and produce locative verbs. Results confirm that children tend to make syntactic errors with sentences containing "fill" and "empty," encoding the content argument as direct object. (33 references) (JL)

Examines issues relating to similarity neighborhoods of words in children's lexicons. Young children's receptive vocabularies were analyzed for three-phoneme, four-phoneme and five-phoneme words. The pattern of the original results from Charles-Luce & Luce (1990) was replicated. (18 references) (Author/CK)

This study assesses children's understanding of the Italian modal verbs "dovere" (must) and "potere" (may) in their dual function of qualification of the speaker's beliefs (epistemic modality) and behaviour regulation (deontic modality). 192 children and 60 adults participated in the experiment. Children aged 3;0 to 9;2 were presented with two…

Thirty-six three- to four-year-old children were tested to assess whether hearing a word-referent link from an ignorant speaker affected children's abilities to subsequently link the same word with an alternative referent offered by another speaker. In the principal experimental conditions, children first heard either an ignorant or a…

Perception and production data were collected from 28 children, ages 1 year 8 months to 3 years 11 months to test four specific hypotheses on the acquisition of initial fricatives and glides in English, based on the assumptions that perception precedes production and unmarked precedes marked. Perception data were collected by the Shvachkin-Garnica…

How a child answers questions provides information about how he or she processes input. A child's early responses to questions at age one year, three months, were compared to her responses at one year, seven months, when she was in the two-word stage. (SW)

In order to examine the extent to which adult judgments of first words depend on visual and auditory cues, spontaneous utterances were collected for boys and girls ages one year, five months to one year, ten months. Adults named the same toys. The older the speaker, the less perception was affected by visual context. (Author/SW)

Twelve one-word-stage children were given minimally contrasting two-word instructions. Since non-linguistic cues were eliminated, comprehension involved making non-syntactic inferences from the word combinations. The children could respond correctly to some of the instructions, and even carried out some unfamiliar activities. (Author/SW)

Crib-talk between identical twin girls and diary records of their speech were examined. It was found that the subjects developed conventional syntax and vocabulary but adapted them in ways which appropriately expressed their twin status. (Author/SED)

Reports two studies which investigated the acquisition of color terms by preschool children. The first was designed to clarify the role of certain conceptual factors in the acquisition of color terms. The second explored how input may interact with these conceptual factors and help to guide the acquisition of color words. (SED)

Describes a study which sought to determine the developmental stage at which children begin to differentiate specific and neutral contingent queries. The study manipulated the familiarity of the adult listener by having each of the 22 children interact both with the mother and with an unfamiliar adult experimenter. (SED)

Discusses a study of the relationship between context and a mother's speech to her prelinguistic infant and a second phase which involved 48 mothers and their infants. Results are discussed in relation to a hypothesis that assumes that mothers' speech is determined by particular interactive rules operating in the mother-infant dyad. (Author/SED)

Examines results of a study of samples of babbling production of 6, 8, and 10-month-old infants from French, Arabic, and Cantonese backgrounds. Various judges were asked to identify those infants from their own linguistics community, with the intention of supporting hypothesis of an early influence on babbling of metaphonological characteristics…

Expands on study by Brown and Hanlon which showed that parents seemed more attuned to semantic value of their child's speech rather than grammatical form. However, this more recent study suggests that language learning environment presents subtle cues, distinguishing between well-formed and ill-formed sentences, evidenced by mothers' inclinations…

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…