Examines how speakers and listeners make judgments on the relationship and truth of propositions connected by subordinating conjunctions. (EKN)

Reviews theoretical arguments from a longitudinal study of 1 Dutch child (age 3;8.13 at start) for considering production as a source of input for analysis and presents empirical evidence supporting the output-as-input hypothesis for the blending of the Dutch words "wats" and "iets." Evidence suggests the child analyzed his own…

Gaze during utterance was examined in a set of bilingual-bimodal twins acquiring spoken English and American Sign Language (ASL) and a set of monolingual twins acquiring ASL. The bilingual-bimodal twins differentiated their languages by age 3. Like the monolingual twins, the bilingual-bimodal twins established mutual gaze at the beginning of their…

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…

Provides longitudinal observations of young children's behaviors while viewing television in their own homes when the children were actively involved in the process of language acquisition. The observations show an overwhelming and consistent occurrence of language-related behaviors among children and parents in the viewing situation. (Author/SED)

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)

Analysis of negative utterances from English-, French-, and Korean-speaking one- through three-year-olds identified nine distinct semantic/pragmatic categories with a similar developmental order in all three languages. Different patterns were found in the form-function relationship for the different categories. (Author/CB)

Investigated the relationship between children's failures to produce unambiguous utterances and the mental effort demands in children (ages five, six, seven, and nine years), using finger-tapping and message production tasks, separately and simultaneously. Findings suggest that the relative effort requirements of communication decrease with…

This study examines the production of regular and irregular participle forms of German with high and low frequencies using a speeded production task. 40 children in two age groups (five- to seven-year olds, eleven- to twelve-year olds) and 35 adult native speakers of German listened to stem forms of verbs presented in a sentential context and were…

Research undertaken to date suggests that important developments in the understanding and use of intonation may take place after the age of 5;0. The present study aims to provide a more comprehensive account of these developments. A specially designed battery of prosodic tasks was administered to four groups of thirty children, from London (U.K.),…

Investigates the linguistic and cognitive aspects of the mastery of the time conjunctions "before" and "after" by young children. (EKN)

Twelve children (mean age 4;1) interacted with their mothers in 2 conversational settings to explore the percentage of topic incorporation and collaboration processes used by mothers and children in play and help settings. Although the help setting appeared to support collaborative action, the play setting permitted the dyads to be informative…

The aim of this study was to determine universal versus language-specific aspects of children's ability to organize cohesive anaphoric relations in discourse. Analyses examine narratives produced on the basis of two picture sentences by subjects of four ages (preschoolers, 7-year olds, 10-year olds, and adults) in four languages: English, German,…

This study examined parental report as a source of information about toddlers' productive vocabulary in 105 low-income families living in either urban or rural communities. Parental report using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory-Short Form (CDI) at child age 2;0 was compared to concurrent spontaneous speech measures and…

Examines the effects of audience adaptation and social cognitive ability on the syntactic strategies employed by four different age groups in the writing of persuasive discourse. (EKN)