Development of specified tense and number morphology in child Catalan and Spanish was found to correlate with the onset of overt subject use in one monolingual child Spanish speaker and four monolingual child Catalan speakers who were studied longitudinally. (Author/VWL)

This study investigates the role of phonological and morphological information in children's developing orthographies in two languages with different linguistic typologies: Hebrew, a Semitic language with a highly synthetic morphology, and Dutch, a Germanic language with a sparse morphology. 192 Israeli and 192 Belgian monolingual schoolchildren…

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…

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…

Examines the possibility that bilingual experience in infancy may affect the unfolding of vocal precursors to speech. The results of this longitudinal study indicate that infants reared in bilingual and monolingual environments manifested similar ages of onset for canonical babbling (production of well-formed syllables), an event fundamentally…

Investigated the communicative interactions of dyads of 4- to 5-year olds during pretend play involving routine, or scripted, events as a function of the children's knowledge of the scripts. The study utilized measures of the quantity and quality of interaction and the strategies employed by the children to establish mutual knowledge. (37…

Hungarian-Russian bilingual preschoolers, in general, paid more attention to allomorphy than did monolingual Hungarian or Russian peers in interpreting transitive sentences with varying word orders. (Author/CB)

Situated within the framework of the conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), this study investigated young children's understanding of metaphorical extensions of spatial motion. Metaphor was defined as a conceptual-linguistic mapping between a source and a target domain. The study focused on metaphors that are structured by the source…

Tested preschool monolingual speakers of Spanish and English in their native countries on classification of familiar objects through a task assessing strategies in a free sort, a sort with instructions to use natural gender, and one for the Spanish speakers with instructions to use grammatical gender. Results suggest that instructional context and…

Examined the use of the mutual exclusivity constraint in naming objects among young children monolingual in English or bilingual in English/Urdu or in English/Greek. The study used three tests of the constraint: disambiguation, rejection and restriction. Findings revealed that bilingual children used the constraint to a lesser extent than…

Thirty middle- to upper middle-class monolingual Dutch speaking families consisting of at least a mother and a father completed the Infant Form "Words and Gestures" of the Dutch adaptation of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory for the same child at 1;1. Considerable inter- and intrafamily variation emerged in how two (or three)…

This study compared the performance of English-speaking children attending French schools (bilingual group) on phonological awareness tests with same age English-speaking children attending English schools. Results of the study are interpreted to reflect the role of second-language input in phonological awareness. (JL)

Presents a longitudinal study on the acquisition of first-, second-, and third-person pronouns in 12 French- and 12 English- speaking children. Findings revealed that the mastery of pronouns did not follow the developmental sequence predicted by the speech-role hypothesis; the person-role hypothesis was valid when children were speaking; and the…