Recent evidence shows that children can use cross-situational statistics to learn new object labels under referential ambiguity (e.g., Smith & Yu, 2008). Such evidence has been interpreted as support for proposals that statistical information about word-referent co-occurrence plays a powerful role in word learning. But object labels represent only…

Young monolingual children typically demonstrate frequent tense shifting during narrative development, whereas older children maintain a consistent narration tense. Therefore, inconsistent tense usage in older children could be an indication of overall limited language skills. However, information regarding tense use in bilinguals has been…

How children go about learning the general regularities that govern language, as well as keeping track of the exceptions to them, remains one of the challenging open questions in the cognitive science of language. Computational modeling is an important methodology in research aimed at addressing this issue. We must determine appropriate learning…

Study of 3 and 7 year olds and adults examined role that changes in continuity, direction, instrument, and causative agent play in children's and adults' initial assumptions about meaning of novel motion verbs and events. Subjects made similar initial assumptions, but children generalized more conservatively than adults to all change types in…

The causal structure of schemas for the actions and states by different classes of English verbs was examined in the elicited narratives of 19 preschool children. Results showed that verbs within a class elicited similar narratives, whereas across classes the event descriptions varied in the animacy of the event participants and the causal…

Children (n=120) were examined as they responded to a picture in a sentence-completion task using a past tense irregular verb. Some irregular verbs were correctly produced by age three, but others were still not mastered by age nine. A preliminary order of development of the verbs is offered. (Author/JDD)

The language transcripts of seven children with Down syndrome (DS) and seven typically developing children with comparable mean length of utterance levels were compared for verb argument structure. Findings suggest that syntactic difficulties may delay children with DS in overcoming the optional subject phenomena and the lesser number of anomalous…

A study of two year olds investigated the nature and development of children's early productivity with verb-argument structure and verb morphology. Results indicated that the children showed no signs of productive verb morphology, but they did use newly learned verbs in some creative ways involving nounlike uses and the appending of locatives.…

A study investigated the first words produced by 17 bilingual children (ages 1-4) speaking English and Mandarin Chinese from environments where both languages were spoken. A greater number of nouns than verbs were produced as first words in both English and Mandarin Chinese. Verbs were produced only in Mandarin Chinese. (Contains references.)…

A study assessed whether two children (ages 4-6) with autism could be taught a child-initiated query as a pivotal response to facilitate the use of grammatical morphemes. Children learned the strategy and acquired and generalized the targeted morpheme. Children also showed increases in mean length of utterance and verb acquisition. (Contains…

The goal of this research is to determine the relevant factors that aid in the acquisition of the perfective aspect in Russian. Results confirm the findings of previous research, which say that aspect is not learned as a uniform category, but rather interrelates with the acquisition of Aktionsarten. This study focuses on the factors responsible…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 27 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the vocalization of /L/ in Philadelphia; (2) a second grade program to isolate and apply knowledge of vowel sounds in word identification; (3) phoneme and…