Parent report instruments adapted from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) examined vocabulary development in children aged 0 ; 8 to 2 ; 6 for two Chinese languages, Mandarin (n = 1694) and Cantonese (n = 1625). Parental reports suggested higher overall scores for Mandarin- than for Cantonese-speaking children from…

Current views on the acquisition of PRO can roughly be divided into two areas: lexical and syntactic accounts. We present data on one verb, "decide," that yields data that not only differs from the data for other similar verbs with the same children, but does not lend itself easily to either type of account. Data from a sentence elicitation task…

P. Bloom's (1990) data on subject omission are often taken as strong support for the view that child language can be explained in terms of full competence coupled with processing limitations in production. This paper examines whether processing limitations in learning may provide a more parsimonious explanation of the data without the need to…

Schaeffer (1997, 2000) argues that children lack knowledge of specificity because Dutch children omit determiners and fail to scramble pronouns. Avrutin & Brun (2001), however, find that Russian children place arguments correctly according to whether they are specific or non-specific. This paper investigates object agreement and specificity in…

Examines phonetic variation in multisyllable babbling of infants from 7 to 11 months of age. The investigation was to verify assumptions that, in infant vocal development, there is a systematic increase in the phonetic variation of these babbles, and separate stages of repetitive and nonrepetitive babbling are posited. (22 references) (GLR)

One child's unique phonological rule is reported, which increased output variety and still yielded a mismatch with the adult form. It is argued that an addition to the strategies described by Menn is needed to account for the discovery of this rule and for later stages of phonological development. (Author)

Analysis of a database of tag questions in children's speech shed light on their structure and function. (JB)

Describes a study that concluded that children generally treat the spatial locatives "in front of" and "behind" in a nondeictic way when a referent object with an obvious front is involved. Tasks that emphasized the viewpoint of the observer, however, caused a deictic response. (GLR)

Argues against Youssef's treatise which pointed out some difficulties in attempting to test Bickerton's language bioprogram hypothesis (LBH), contending that the treatise seriously misunderstood certain key concepts of the LBH and dismissed with questionable reasoning some important findings which supported the state/process distinction as a…

Edwards (1992c) concerns data and data use rather than manuals. It presents principles to facilitate reliable archive research in an imperfect world. MacWhinney and Snow (1992) endorse the principles but disagree on important details, discussed in this response. (21 references) (KM)

Describes a study in which an extensive fuzzy boundary was identified within the adult extension of two exemplary object-words, "dog" and "ball." It is argued that there has been an underestimation in previous research of the degree of correspondence that exists between child and adult extension. (33 references) (GLR)

Explores the early use of "behind" and "in front of" with large reference objects among 33 children. The patterns for the use of these locatives suggest an acquisition process in which new conceptual resources lead to the re-analysis of object configurations and thus to new aspects of meaning. (SED)

Discusses published references to deaf infants babbling like normal hearing children and states that the relationship between babbling and hearing still remains to be proven. (EKN)

Uncertainty was researched as a perceptual structure which mediates the transition from sensorimotor activity to language. The guiding notions are that the attentional system is geared to uncertainty from the beginning of life and that a speaker's language use is coordinated with this system as it emerges. (Author)

Describes the CHILDES/BIB electronic bibliographic database, its contents, and its relationship to the CHILDES database. CHILDES is a depository of child language corpora and is the publisher of CHAT (a transcription manual) and CLAN (an electronic package for child language research). (GLR)