This study examines infants' joint attention behavior and language development in a rural village in Nigeria. Participants included eight younger (1;0 to 1;5, M age=1;2) and eight older toddlers (1;7 to 2;7, M age=2;1). Joint attention behaviors in social interaction contexts were recorded and coded at two time points six months apart. Analyses…

This study examines the mental processes involved in children's on-line recognition of inflected word forms using event-related potentials (ERPs). Sixty children in three age groups (20 six- to seven-year-olds, 20 eight- to nine-year-olds, 20 eleven- to twelve-year-olds) and 23 adults (tested in a previous study) listened to sentences containing…

Examines (1) preschool children's production of multiple, hierarchically related labels; (2) the pragmatic consequences of the inherent asymmetry of inclusion relations; and (3) the influence of morphology (modifier plus noun constructions vs. simple lexemes) at the subordinate level. Performance shows an inability to label objects flexibly at…

Effects of negative input for 13 categories of grammatical error were assessed in a longitudinal study of naturalistic adult-child discourse. Two-hour samples of conversational interaction were obtained at two points in time, separated by a lag of 12 weeks, for 12 children (mean age 2;0 at the start). The data were interpreted within the framework…

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)

The acquisition of noun gender on articles was studied in a sample of 21 young German-speaking children. Longitudinal spontaneous speech data were used. Data analysis is based on 22 two-hourly speech samples per child from 6 children between 1 ; 4 and 3 ; 8 and on 5 two-hourly speech samples per child from 15 children between 1 ; 4 and 2 ; 10. The…

This paper focuses on the aspects of the lexicon in 66 prematurely born very-low-birth-weight and 87 full-term Finnish children at 2;0, studied using the Finnish version of the "MacArthur Communicative Developmental Inventory". The groups did not differ in vocabulary size. Furthermore, the female advantage in vocabulary size was not seen…

Investigates how the noun and verb classes develop in the free speech of a French child between the ages of 1 year, 2 months to 2 years and 6 months from the perspective of semantic and grammatical development. Analyses indicate that in French acquisition, nouns clearly predominate over verbs until 20 months of age at least, but that verbs are…

Examined input frequency, sentence position, and duration as contributing factors to grammatical inflections. In parents' conversations with and stories aimed at young children, noun plural inflections were more frequent than third singular verb inflections, especially in sentence-final position. Analysis of four mothers' speech when reading…

The transition from slow to rapid word-learning was examined in a longitudinal study of 18 children. Results revealed that most children evidenced a prolonged period during which rate of acquisition increased, with most of the acquired words being nouns, while those who demonstrated gradual word-learning acquired a balance of nouns and other word…

Presents a study of young children's understanding that pronouns and proper names cannot be modified by pronominal adjectives. Some nonsyntactic theories are discussed that support the claim that children understand knowledge of word order through the rules that order abstract linguistic categories. (31 references) (GLR)

In two experiments we tested the hypothesis that children have a basic problem in mastering the attributive relation because it involves a two-step logical-semantic integration process of the head-noun and the attributive adjective. Hebrew-speaking children were asked to interpret highly familiar adjective-noun combinations by selecting a photo…

Examines pragmatic factors that bias English-speaking children to produce more of the nouns and fewer of the verbs than they know. Data from 44 parent-child dyads in the New England directory of the CHILDES data base were analyzed. (Author/VWL)

The acquisition of German plurals has been the focus of controversy in the last decade. In this paper we claim that degree of productivity (i.e. the capacity of nouns to form potential plurals) plays a key role in determining pace of acquisition. A plural elicitation task was administered to 84 Viennese German-speaking children aged 2;6 to 6;0.…

Reinterprets the findings of Kim "et al" (1994), who argue that the preference children and adults show for regular inflection for verbs and nouns with novel meanings should be attributed to their grammatically based sensitivity to the derivations of these verbs and nouns. This article argues for a semantic/functional instead of a grammatical…