This paper investigates the acquisition of compound vs. phrasal stress (hót dog vs. hot dóg) in English. This has previously been shown to be acquired quite late, in contrast to recent research showing that infants both perceive and prefer rhythmic patterns in their own language. Subjects (40 children in four groups the averages ages of which are 5;4, 7;2, 9;3 and 11;6 and 10 adults) were shown pairs of pictures representing a compound word and the corresponding phrase. They heard a prerecorded tape with the names of the items, and were asked to indicate which one they heard. In addition to 9 real compounds and corresponding phrases, 9 novel compounds were presented (rédcup = invented type of flower vs. red cúp). A gradual increase in overall correct scores until age twelve was found along with a significant effect of real vs. novel compounds (p < 0·001), and an overwhelming tendency for the younger children to prefer compounds regardless of stress. We conclude that the results are due to the slow development of the ability to use prosodic information to override a strong lexical bias.

Previous evidence suggests that the structure of similarity neighbourhoods in the developing mental lexicon may differ from that of the fully developed lexicon. The similarity relationships used to organize words into neighbourhoods was investigated in 20 pre-school children (age 3;7 to 5;11) using a two alternative forced-choice classification task. Children classified the similarity of test words relative to a standard word to determine neighbourhood membership. The similarity relationship between the test and standard words varied orthogonally in terms of type of similarity and position of overlap. Standard words were drawn from neighbourhoods differing in density. Results showed that dense neighbourhoods were organized by phoneme similarity in the onset+nucleus or rhyme positions of overlap. In contrast, sparse neighbourhoods appeared to be organized by phoneme similarity in the onset+nucleus, but manner similarity in the rhyme. These results are integrated with previous findings from infants and adults to propose a developmental course of change in the mental lexicon.

Most children aged 1;6 to 2;0 begin to use utterances of two words or more. It is therefore important for child phonologists to consider the development of phonetic and phonological phenomena that characterize connected speech. The longitudinal case study reported here investigated three juncture types – assimilation, elision and liaison – in the speech of a typically-developing child between the ages of 2;4 and 3;4. Attempts at production of these adult juncture types occurred from the onset of two-word utterances. However, for some juncture types, the child still had to perfect the intergestural relationships and gestural articulations that the adult between-word junctures demand. This process of phonetic development was largely accomplished by the age of 3;4. With one exception, between-word junctures appear not to be the result of learned phonological rules or processes. The exception is liaison involving /r/, which did not occur until the child was three years old.

We study the ability of children to provide an appropriate continuation for a stimulus sentence, taking into account the joint demands of situational aspect and grammatical aspect. We hypothesize that the aspectual transitions required by some aspectual combinations play a role in the difficulty of providing an appropriate continuation for them. We tested 130 French-speaking children of 5;06 to 9;0. In general, the data are consistent with the idea that the ability of children to construe an appropriate continuation for a stimulus clause is a function of both the situational aspect of the clause and the grammatical aspect provided by the verbal morpheme. There is a significant tense×situational aspect interaction in the number of continuations that children are able to provide in answer to the stimuli. Contrary to our expectations, there is no significant tense×situational aspect in the number of appropriate continuations, this being perhaps due to the small number of continuations for each stimulus type, but there are trends in the expected direction, which further studies may be able to confirm.

Data from one English-Italian bilingual child (1;10–3;1) are presented in this study which challenge the hypothesis that the consistent realization of overt subjects in English is caused by the emergence of finite verbal morphology in the child's grammar. The argument is made for the emergence of subjects as an independent grammatical property of English, namely the marking of person deixis. Throughout the period of observation there is a significant proportion of overt subjects in the child's English utterances appearing both with finite and non-finite verb forms. Production of subjects stabilizes at 90% of obligatory contexts when no morphological correlates of finiteness have been acquired yet. While subjects are produced at significantly lower rates in Italian, we observe the consolidation of a number of inflected forms marking person agreement. The emergence of overt subjects in English on the one hand, and of subject–verb agreement in Italian on the other suggest that this bilingual child is grammaticalizing the all-important function of person deixis in language-specific ways: the same function is expressed by different forms in the child's two languages.

It is commonly believed that first-learned words correspond with first-learned categories (both described as ‘basic level’) leading to the belief that language acquisition is a reasonably good indicator of early cognition. However, toddlers often overextend their first words. Do these errors reflect their comprehension? Two experiments were conducted in order to examine two-year-olds' production and comprehension of basic-level terms. The results showed overextensions both in production (e.g. children labelled a rocket ‘airplane’) and comprehension (e.g. they pointed to a rocket when airplane was requested). One reason toddlers extend labels to a wider conceptual domain is because they have not clearly differentiated basic-level concepts from related conceptual categories.

We investigated the influence of exposure to phonologically similar words on four-year-olds' acquisition of novel object words. In Experiment 1, hearing phonological neighbours BEFORE learning a new word did not influence children's novel word productions. In Experiment 2, when children heard the phonological neighbours of a novel word AFTER learning a new word, they correctly produced the target word more often than children who did not receive this exposure. These findings suggest that exposing children to similar sounding words after a novel word was introduced may have helped maintain a representation of that word in working memory, leading to enhanced word learning.

In a recent commentary, Grinstead (2000) argues against Bates & Goodman's (1999) claims that the development of grammar is contingent on developments in the lexicon, and that, therefore, there is no need for an independent grammar domain. Citing data on the acquisition of negative commands in Catalan and Spanish, Grinstead argues that beyond grammatical elements that are linked with lexical items, there must also exist independently a computational component, which includes grammatical constraints. He argues further that these constraints are observed from the beginning of acquisition. The purpose of this note is, first, to challenge the evidence Grinstead brings to bear in support of this position and, second, to argue further that the acquisition of negative commands in Spanish is better understood in terms of item-based learning combined with low functional load.

Despite growing empirical evidence to the contrary, claims continue to be made that the grammar of people with Williams syndrome (WS) is intact. We show that even in a simple elicited imitation task examining the syntax of relative clauses, older children and adults with WS (n = 14, mean age = 17;0 years) only reach the level of typical five-year-old controls. When tested systematically in a number of different laboratories, all aspects of WS language show delay and/or deviance throughout development. We conclude that the grammatical abilities of people with WS should be described in terms of relative rather than absolute proficiency, and that the syndrome should no longer be used to bolster claims about the existence of independently functioning, innately specified modules in the human brain.

The Editor would like to acknowledge the help given by Dr Nenagh Kemp of the Max Planck Institute Child Study Centre in Manchester, in preparing this section of the Journal for publication.

This is a position paper modelling the domain of linguistic literacy and its development through the life span. It aims to provide a framework for the analysis of language development in the school years, integrating sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic notions of variation, language awareness, and literacy in a comprehensive model. The paper focuses on those aspects of literacy competence that are expressed in language as well as aspects of linguistic knowledge that are affected by literacy competence, tracing the route that children take in appropriating linguistic literacy as part of their cognitive abilities and examining the effect of literacy on language across development. Our view of linguistic literacy consists of one defining feature: control over linguistic variation from both a user-dependent (‘lectal’) and a context-dependent (modality, genre, and register) perspective; of one concomitant process: metalanguage and its role in language development; and of one condition: familiarity with writing and written language from two aspects: written language as discourse style – the recognition that the kind of language used for writing is essentially different from the one used for speech; and written language as a notational system – the perception and growing command of the representational system that is used in the written modality. Linguistic literacy is viewed as a constituent of language knowledge characterized by the availability of multiple linguistic resources and by the ability to consciously access one's own linguistic knowledge and to view language from various perspectives.

In their position paper, Dorit Ravid & Liliana Tolchinsky have made a critical attempt to develop a theoretical framework which would account for the success of learning to read and write in different languages throughout the life span. The major focus of this framework is on the linguistic perspective of literacy development – leading to the concept of linguistic literacy. The authors highlight those aspects of literacy competence that are expressed in language as well as aspects of linguistic knowledge that are affected by literacy competence. They postulate control as a defining feature, metalanguage as a concomitant process, and familiarity with writing and written language as a condition of linguistic literacy. These postulations can be seen as highly relevant from both a theoretical and a practical point of view since such framework is useful in order to develop research initiatives and educational programs on literacy development. The view of literacy as a constituent of language knowledge characterized by the availability of multiple linguistic resources can be seen as powerful. However, given the multifaceted character of written language and its development, the question is to what extent the concept of linguistic literacy should be relativized. In the present commentary the impact of sociocultural and cognitive constraints on literacy will be stressed to disambiguate the monolithic conception of linguistic literacy.

Ravid & Tolchinsky are to be applauded for proposing literacy as a central topic in first language acquisition. A synthesis of research in spoken language, in literacy and literacy practices and the lines of enquiry represented in MacWhinney (1999) has interesting consequences for theories of first language acquisition, not least the nativist ones. This response focuses on constructions but a brief list of controversial points in R&T's paper will be useful.

Among the various processes that characterize the development of literacy competence presented by Ravid & Tolchinsky in their paper, two are particularly relevant for studies of language development focusing on crosslinguistic sentence processing: (1) the continuity vs. discontinuity between the differential access to oral and written codes within the same language and between languages; (2) the representational status of the conscious access to language provided by the development of literacy, which renders variability more accessible and controllable. In this short note, I shall deal only with the first of these.

As Ravid & Tolchinsky (2002) have indicated in their article, literacy has profound effects upon the development of language in school-age children, adolescents, and adults. Once children are able to read proficiently – typically by eight or nine years – their ability to acquire increasingly sophisticated aspects of language can expand greatly. The convergence of language and literacy is readily apparent upon examining the lexicon, a language domain that is subject to unlimited growth through the lifespan. For this reason, I would like to elaborate on the role of literacy in relation to lexical development beyond the preschool years, focusing on processes that facilitate the learning of word meanings. In this commentary, it will be shown that there is an ongoing reciprocal relationship between lexical development and literacy in which unfamiliar words are first encountered in print and learned through various metalinguistic strategies. Subsequently, this increased knowledge of words leads to improved comprehension of text, which in turn, leads to further expansion of the lexicon (Sternberg & Powell, 1983).

Ravid & Tolchinksy (R&T) introduce an important concept for the field of language acquisition and development: linguistic literacy. To be ‘linguistically literate’, they say, one must possess both ‘knowledge of the two major linguistic modalities – speech and writing’ and ‘a linguistic repertoire that encompasses a wide range of registers and genres’. These two statements make clear the great breadth of research that the authors have considered in formulating their model.

In their conceptual framework for linguistic literacy development, Ravid & Tolchinsky synthesize research studies from several perspectives. One of these is corpus-based research, which has been used for several large-scale research studies of spoken and written registers over the past 20 years. In this approach, a large, principled collection of natural texts (a ‘corpus’) is analysed using computational and interactive techniques, to identify the salient linguistic characteristics of each register or text variety. Three characteristics of corpus-based analysis are particularly important (see Biber, Conrad & Reppen 1998):

1. [bull ] a special concern for the representativeness of the text sample being analysed, and for the generalizability of findings;

2. [bull ] overt recognition of the interactions among linguistic features: the ways in which features co-occur and alternate;

3. [bull ] a focus on register as the most important parameter of linguistic variation: strong patterns of use in one register often represent only weak patterns in other registers.

The authors of this rich and interesting paper have done a fine service to the field of child language by bringing to the forefront the largely neglected topic of later language development. Major discourse-oriented studies including children beyond preschool age have been confined to oral production of narrative texts (Peterson & McCabe, 1983; Berman & Slobin, 1994; Hickmann, in press), and they all leave off at around age ten. The pathbreaking work of Labov (1972) did in fact consider the language of pre-adolescents and teenagers in explicitly linguistic terms, but this also concerned oral narratives without focusing on development. One important contribution of the present study, then, is to show that the progression from early school-age via middle childhood and on to adolescence and adulthood involves far more than merely increased vocabulary.

Ravid & Tolchinsky present a valuable framework for understanding the development of metalinguistic knowledge (i.e. grasp of language form as opposed to content). Although this framework makes an admirable contribution, we question the authors' emphasis on familiarity with written language as an enabling condition, and instead outline an approach that makes more obvious provision for cognitive foundations and early development. This approach attempts to locate the development of metalinguistic understanding within the context of domain-general and age-related changes in cognitive function – in particular, increases in the complexity of representational structures involved in conscious reflection.

Ravid & Tolchinsky's paper draws a comprehensive picture of the fact that literacy is a lengthy developing process involving many linguistic factors which sometimes begins even before school age and lasts until adulthood. I very much appreciated the breadth and thoroughness of Ravid & Tolchinsky's paper and, in particular, the fact that they have taken the relationship between oral language and literacy into account. It seems to me that this is rarely the case in current linguistic theories and I would like to offer a few comments on some of the consequences that a serious approach to literacy development would have on the studies of both oral language and literacy, and on linguistic theories themselves as well.