Language documentation efforts are most often concerned with the adult language and usually do not include the language used by and with children. Essential parts of the natural linguistic behaviour of communities thus remain undocumented, and a growing body of literature explores what language documentation, language maintenance, and language…

Historically, first language acquisition research was a painstaking process of observation, requiring the laborious hand coding of children's linguistic productions, followed by the generation of abstract theoretical proposals for how the developmental process unfolds. Recently, the ability to collect large-scale corpora of children's language…

This article demonstrates how the Comparative Method can be applied to cross-linguistic research on language acquisition. The Comparative Method provides a systematic procedure for organizing and interpreting acquisition data from different languages. The Comparative Method controls for cross-linguistic differences at all levels of the grammar and…

The field of first language acquisition (FLA) needs to take into account data from the broadest typological array of languages and language-learning environments if it is to identify potential universals in child language development, and how these interact with socio-cultural mechanisms of acquisition. Yet undertaking FLA research in remote…

This article questions how two very similar sets of experiments can yield such very different findings, and comments on the differences between the studies. Here Annamarie Kerkhoff presents a commentary on some perceived differences between the studies in areas such as age groups and group sizes evaluated. Kerkhoff also comments on some…

What are the sources of variation in the input, and how much do they matter for language acquisition? This study examines frequency variation in manner-of-articulation classes in child and adult input. The null hypothesis is that segmental frequency distributions of language varieties are unigram (modelable by stationary, ergodic processes), and…

Our understanding of the relationships between lexical and phonological development has been enhanced in recent years by increased interest in this area from language scientists, psychologists and phonologists. This review article provides a summary of research, highlighting similarities and differences across studies. It is suggested that the…

Fikkert (1994) analyzed a large corpus of Dutch children's early language production, and found that they often add targetless syllables to their words in order to create bisyllabic feet. In this note we point out a methodological problem with that analysis: in an important number of cases, epenthetic vowels occur at places where grammatical…

Argues that inferring the intension (meaning) of children's words solely from the words' extension (referential scope) is problematic and describes two studies of the intension of children's words which involve a different approach. (JMB)

McCaig's article, "How Not To Analyze the Syntax of Children," appears in this issue, pp. 612-18. (SW)

Edwards (1992c) concerns data and data use rather than manuals. It presents principles to facilitate reliable archive research in an imperfect world. MacWhinney and Snow (1992) endorse the principles but disagree on important details, discussed in this response. (21 references) (KM)

Presents four principles for archive-based language research: maximum readability and minimum bias; consistent encoding for exhaustive computer search; systematic contrastiveness; and data comparability in elicitation, transcription and coding. Examples from existing computer archives illustrate these and other principles, and strategies are…

Outlines descriptive, theoretical, and methodological advances in child language research since the first volume of the "Journal of Child Language" was published. Papers in this volume build on earlier research, point the way to new research avenues, and open new lines of inquiry. (Contains 36 references.) (JP)

Article focused on the acquisition of sign language by chimpanzees in comparison with the acquisition of spoken languages and sign languages by human children. (Editor/RK)

The McCaig article appears in this issue, pp. 612-18. (RD)