This study's objective is to analyse repair sequences for referring problems that occur in conversation with young children (two to three years old), which have shown how reference recognition unfolds along a collaborative process. The results reveal that caretakers frame varying repair questions and that the children locally answer the…

This study investigates the emergence and development of the discourse-pragmatic functions of the Japanese subject markers "wa" and "ga" from a usage-based perspective (Tomasello, 2000). The use of each marker in longitudinal speech data for four Japanese children from 1;0 to 3;1 and their parents available in the CHILDES…

The acquisition of reference involves both morphosyntax and pragmatics. This study investigates whether Dutch, English and French two- to three-year-old children differentiate in their use of determiners between non-specific/specific reference, newness/givenness in discourse and mutual/no mutual knowledge between interlocutors. A brief analysis of…

The focus of this paper is the acquisition of the verb "eat." The transcripts of 40 children who were audiotaped monthly from 1;0 to 3;0, showed that "eat" was the first member of this verb class to be acquired. (16 references) (JL)

Word learning by young children is viewed as a problem deriving from the use of forms of discourse texts. Uses of causal and temporal terms in private speech by a child studied longitudinally from 1;9 to 3;0 are analyzed from this perspective. (Contains 38 references.) (JL)

Adult "redoing" sequences (expansions and repeats) in conversations between adult and child (age 1;6) are analyzed with a conversational analytic approach, and two ways in which redoing sequences are involved in the initiation of repair are explored. It is proposed that a redoing sequence picks up a child's utterance and displays it for some kind…

Investigates conversational characteristics (discourse features, illocutionary force and style parameters) of mothers of two-year-old twins and mothers of two-year-old singletons with older siblings. Finds significant differences in conversational characteristics, and between twins' and singletons' language scores on measures of language…

A group of studies on child language development between ages 2 and 3 is presented. The studies, originally published between 1970 and 1989, are the result of a longitudinal research program. An introductory section describes the contents, offers background information on several different perspectives (developmental, learnability, cross-cultural)…

Analysis of videotapes of 19 parent-child dyads during bookreading when children were 2.5 years old, and subsequent analysis of the children's paradigmatic thought organization at 3.5 years, revealed a significant correlation between superordinate level labels in parents' talk and 3 measures of children's paradigmatic organization. (45 references)…

Examined miscommunication episodes occurring between 2.5-year-olds and their parents during videotaped free play sessions. Although children generally responded appropriately in form to parental clarification requests, they responded more often to and resolved successfully more of those following their own requests than those following their…

A study investigated whether young children use sentence accent to mark new information as systematically as they have been shown to handle contrastive stress within naturally-occurring discourse. Data were drawn from the spontaneous conversations of a boy-and-girl twin pair with adults. The twins' speech was coded in carefully-defined categories…

The present study discusses and describes codeswitches produced by two trilingual children acquiring English, Spanish and Hebrew simultaneously from birth. Data were collected regularly over a period of 20 months (from age 2;6 to 4;2 for M and from age 5;5 to 7;1 for E), in naturalistic tape-recorded sessions. Codeswitches drawn from…

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)

Papers on child language development include: "Sentence Frame Effects on Children's Category Judgments" (Alison K. Adams); "Color Similarity in Children's Classifications and Extension of Object Labels" (Dare Baldwin); "Situational Properties of Early Verb Meaning" (Pol Cuvelier); "Similarity, Specificity, and…