Studied the case of bilingual acquisition across two modalities to examine diverging hypotheses about the types of knowledge underlying early bilingualism. Three children acquiring Langues des Signes Quebecoise and French, and three children acquiring French and English were videotaped over a year while novel and familiar speakers of each child's…

Describes the phonological acquisition of 129 monolingual Putonghua-speaking children, aged 1.6 to 4.6 years. Children's errors suggested that Putonghua-speaking children master four elements of Putonghua syllables in this order: (1) tones; (2) syllable-initial consonants; (3) vowels; and (4) syllable-final consonants. Suggests that the saliency…

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…

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…

Sensitivity to differences in lexical stress was studied in monolingual French-, German-, and Swedish-speaking four- and five-year-olds. For most discriminations the older children performed better, but for a trisyllabic discrimination not found in French, the older children performed less well, supporting an attunement theory of language…

Analyzes the late babbling productions of a French child and compares them with data from similar studies of English and Thai children. Shows that although the French child and his English counterparts share some universal phonetic preferences, a selective, language-specific phonetic acquisition takes place during the babbling stage. (Author/MES)

Analyzes mother and child speech in free play conversation for different semantic and syntactic categories. Based on the study of changes taking place over time in children's use of semantic categories, argues against the hypothesis that the mother's speech is gradually adjusted to the child's performance. (Author/MES)

Reports on a study investigating the nature of metaphoric language in children's usage, specifically examining the unconventional word uses of one child between the ages of two years, three months, and four years, ten months. (Author/AM)

Proposes that the optional subject phenomenon in early child language arises because children have not yet acquired the morphological elements (primarily modal and tense) necessary to distinguish subject-taking verbs (e.g., finite verbs) from their non-subject-taking counterparts (e.g., infinitives). (Author/CB)

To examine the persistence of phonological selectional constraints on young children's lexical choices, the words attempted in the conversational speech of a longitudinal sample of 12 normally developing preschoolers from age 2;0 to 5;0 were scored for syllabic length, presence of consonant clusters, and distribution of constituent phonemes. (29…

This study applies perspectives from sociolinguistics to investigate the language mixing of a bilingual two year old acquiring Norwegian and English simultaneously in Norway. The investigation stresses the need to examine more carefully the roles of dominance and context in the language mixing of young bilingual children. (40 references) (JL)

Three mother-child dyads were videotaped in a free play setting when children were two- and three-years old. Children's spontaneous comprehensible utterances were rated for grammaticality and ambiguity of function, and mothers' responses were noted. (Contains 14 references.) (Author)

Drawing on archival data on the sound systems of five children ages 3 to 4 with normal development and 47 children ages 3 to 6 with phonological delay, one chain shift (interaction of phonological substitution errors) was identified in the speech of six children. Different derivational and constraint-based accounts of the chain shift were…

Examined the role of animacy and pronouns as children ages 2 to 3 years acquired transitive construction. Participants learned two nonce verbs, one of which was modeled in several transitive sentence frames and the other in neutral sentence frames. Many children produced transitive sentences with the first verb, but only children near age 3…

Two studies explored the relationship between young children's pragmatic skills and their grammatical development. The studies involved videotaping children with and without autism interacting with their parents at age 1;2 and 2;7. In both studies, pragmatic accomplishments of mutual attention, as well as mother's conversational style, explained…