Observation of adult response to children's initial overextensions (use of the correct label, correction of error, and demonstration of object attributes) revealed that demonstrations were the most important factor in inducing toddlers to assign an object to its adult category. (Author/CB)

Examines speech samples from six children aged 2 years to 2 years, 5 months, with Mean Lengths of Utterance ranging from 2.93 to 4.14, were examined for evidence of six syntactic categories: determiner, adjective, noun, noun phrase, preposition, and prepositional phrase. (HOD)

This article deals with an important question in the area of developmental psycholinguistics. It studies the conditions for a presyntactcic utterance to become a "canonical sentence" or "canonical utterance" at the stage of the two-word combinations. Two main points are highlighted: (1) how a prelinguistic utterance between 9-12 months of age can…

Replies to a report on three toddlers who evidenced a late vocabulary spurt. The article argues that differences in assessing productive vocabulary and the questionable inference that size of the lexicon is a reliable indicator of the vocabulary spurt make it inappropriate to compare these children to previous studies directly measuring change in…

Offers resolutions to the paradox of infants' ability to abstract patterns over specific items and toddlers' lack of ability to generalize patterns over specific English words/constructions. Argues that contradictions are rooted in differing methodologies and stimuli content. Suggests that the patterns infants extract from linguistic input are not…

Extends the study of children's knowledge of Binding Condition B to a construction containing pronouns embedded in conjoined noun phrases. The study included pronouns bound by a quantifier. Results support the argument that anaphoric relations are constrained by more than one module of grammar. (12 references) (Author/CK)

Analysis of a complete set of word-forms produced by a one-year-old at the one-word stage found that the data showed little phonetic variability and that phonological development during the period studied (about one year) was qualitatively continuous with subsequent development. (Author/CB)

A longitudinal study examined two-year-olds' acquisition of the English auxiliary system after a six-week exposure to additional auxiliary input in varying sentence contexts. Results indicated that subjects did not significantly differ from a baseline group that did not receive additional input. (Author/CB)

Available evidence suggests that early language intervention is effective when designed to meet the needs of the individual child. Intervention should begin when risk or predisposing factors so indicate or when significant delays are present. Intervention should respect the child's developmental level in relevant areas and should address…

In a study of event knowledge, 13 2-year-olds were observed interacting with their mothers over a 5-month period. Results indicated that children's increasing event knowledge facilitated their language development (e.g., lexical type use, action verb use) and their lexical token use. (Contains 33 references.) (Author/LB)

Examined the representation of phrase structure in early child German through the investigation of longitudinal data from seven German-speaking toddlers with respect to verb placement, verb inflection, negation, /wh/ pronouns, and complementizers. It is argued that children construct phrase-structure trees in a gradual fashion, on the basis of…

Vocabulary development of three children, aged 1;6 to 1;8, who had not yet begun to evidence a vocabulary spurt was followed to determine if these children would eventually have a vocabulary spurt. Results of the study are discussed in the context of the argument that a substantial proportion of children never evidence a vocabulary spurt. (JL)

Uses longitudinal data on language acquisition to examine children's language and sense of self and others. Referential analysis of children's discourse found that children do locate self and other in a spatio-temporal realm. Form-function analysis found that children's discourse about self was more varied in form and in semantic and pragmatic…

Mental terms in mothers' and their childrens' speech at two and three years were studied to examine relationships between maternal and child use. Nineteen mother and child dyads were videotaped for 1 hour on each of 2 days when children were 2;0 and again for 2 1-hour sessions on separate days when they were 3;0. Mental terms were noted. (JL)

In this study, phonological similarity neighborhood sizes were calculated for expressive lexicon derived from 2 vocabulary lists representative of children aged 1;3 to 3;0. Over 80% of the words in these early lexicons had at least one phonological neighbor; nearly 20% had six or more phonological neighbors. (Contains 29 references.)