Young children readily acquire new words with consonants and syllable structures already used accurately (IN words). They have more difficulty acquiring new words with consonants or syllable structures never before produced or attempted (OUT words). In the present study, we examined children's acquisition of a third type of word, containing consonants the children had attempted in the past but never produced accurately (ATTEMPTED words). IN, OUT and ATTEMPTED words and their object referents were presented to 11 young children in a series of play sessions. The children's production and comprehension of the words were then assessed. No comprehension differences among the three types of words were observed. However, ATTEMPTED words as well as OUT words were less likely to be acquired in production than IN words. Some revisions in models of child phonology are proposed to accommodate these findings.

Stoel-Gammon & Cooper (1984) have recently presented phonological analyses in this journal of three children acquiring English. Their general conclusion is that the three children are each following their own unique pattern of acquisition. This paper is a response to that conclusion. We first point out that such research needs to distinguish different possible causes of variation. We then go on to criticize the method of analysis they used, arguing that it disposes the results towards individual variation. Next, we present an alternative analysis, using a different methodology, and show that the children's patterns of acquisition are actually relatively similar. Lastly, we conclude that both their and our results provide evidence for early phonological processing in opposition to the biological model presented in Locke (1983).

This study evaluated the age-relationship, intra-sample reliability and grammatical validity of MLU-like measures of utterance length in the free speech of 21 normally developing children aged 1;8 to 2;8 with MLU between 1·05 and 3·06. Contrary to a previous study by Klee & Fitzgerald (1985). it was found that measures of utterance length hold a good relation with age, are reliable and predict grammatical development well in the age and MLU range considered. It is argued that there are identifiable points in the developmental evolution of MLU and MLU-like indices beyond which their reliability and validity have serious problems. Below these points, they constitute sound measures of syntactic development.

This paper seeks to account for a culturally patterned set of analogic renamings found in Huli baby talk, nursery rhymes and children's verbal games. These socialization activities evidence a marked concern with body motifs and appellations. In accordance with ethnographic paradigms of explanation, the frame of reference is broadened to include consideration of inter-adult behaviour involving ‘talk about the body’ to assess what is being learnt from such interactions as well as what communicative intents are encoded. The argument is developed that in addition to the significance of these play routines in sensitizing the child to cultural rules about speaking, these ludic forms also appear implicated in both an evolutionary and logico-operational sense in the conventional anatomical nomenclature.

Utterances for which clarification is requested have not always been considered an integral part of the ensuing contingent query sequence. To examine this issue, characteristics of children's utterances which were targeted for requests for clarification were examined to determine if they influence the nature of responses. Any relationship here would (a) establish the role of the initial utterance as part of the contingent query discourse unit, and (b) begin the documentation of that role. Twenty-six children (nine aged between two and three, eleven between three and four, and six between four and five) were videotaped in a one-hour free-play session. Twenty times during the session an experimenter signalled non-comprehension of a comprehensible utterance by asking ‘What?’. The queried utterances were categorized as serving one of three functions (interpersonal, child activity or environmental) and as occurring in one of three social contexts (eye contact, other social or private). Responses were classified as being either a no-response, repetition or revision. Results showed that social context interacted with response type: more no-responses and fewer repetitions occurred in the private relative to the eye-contact context. This interaction demonstrated that the initial utterance plays a role in response determination, and is therefore an important part of the contingent query sequence. Findings also indicated that response type changed with development.

Infant temperament characteristics of activity level, task persistence and affect were measured in an eight-month longitudinal study of eight children. Discourse and pragmatic features of their mothers' speech, specifically total number of utterances and use of self-repetitions, directives and attention-getting devices, were also monitored. Pearson correlation analysis suggested complex interactions between maternal speech and infant temperament. In some cases a maternal speech pattern appears to maintain an infant temperament characteristic. In others, a child characteristic appears to maintain a maternal speech form. The results are used to argue that non-linguistic child behaviours may influence maternal speech and deserve further attention in investigations of the link between maternal speech and child-language development.

The evidence for the Contrastive Hypothesis (Clark 1980, 1983a, b, 1987, Barrett 1978, 1982) is reviewed. An examination of data from the acquisition of object words, relational words and superordinate terms reveals little support for this hypothesis that young children automatically assume that every two words in their lexicons contrast. Further, theoretical problems with the positions that children assign words to semantic fields as they are acquiring them and that innovations are used to fill lexical gaps make these stances untenable.

An experiment is described which investigates preschool children's understanding of temporal terms. Children aged 2;11 to 4;5 were required to act out situations described by sentences containing before and after. One set of sentences used both a simplified task and simplified materials. These sentences were simple commands, and they only required the children to act out the situation described by the main clause in order to demonstrate comprehension. Performance with these sentences was superior to performance with sentences like those of Clark (1971) and Grain (1982). In addition, children only used an order-of-mention strategy with the Clark sentences. With both the Clark and the Grain sentences, there were more omissions of the subordinate clause in before sentences than in after sentences. There was also a tendency, with these two types of sentence, for children to act out only the first clause in before sentences.

The present study examined the types of linguistic knowledge that affect children's ability to understand and produce novel compounds in Hebrew. Sixty children aged 3;0–9;0, and 12 adults, were asked to interpret and to produce novel Noun + Noun compounds. Their comprehension was in advance of their production. In comprehension, morphological form of head nouns had little effect: from age four, children did equally well on all the compound forms tested; they identified head nouns and also possible relations between heads and their modifiers. In production, though, knowledge of morphological form was crucial. The fewer the changes children had to make in the forms of head nouns, the earlier they mastered that compound pattern. Finally, children who produced novel compounds correctly were also able to interpret novel compounds, but not vice versa.

This study examined the effect of two linguistic factors on children's understanding of idioms. Kindergarten, first, third and fourth graders listened to idiomatic expressions either alone or at the end of short story contexts. Their task was to explain verbally the intended meanings of these idioms and then to choose the correct idiomatic interpretations of these phrases. The results showed that in the presence of supporting context younger children (kindergarten and first graders) understood idioms that were syntactically frozen (e.g. turn back the clock) better than they did idioms which can be seen in a variety of syntactic forms (e.g. lay down the law). Older children (third and fourth graders) comprehended both kinds of idiom equally well. Moreover, with context, children at all grade levels were better at explaining the figurative meanings of idioms whose literal and idiomatic interpretations were closely related (e.g. hold your tongues) than they were at explaining idioms whose literal and figurative meanings were not closely related (e.g. beat around the bush). Without context there were few significant differences noted in children's understanding of the different kinds of idiom. The significance of these findings for developmental models of idiom comprehension is discussed.

This paper's authors examine the interpretation of transitive sentences with varying word orders /SVO, OVS, SOV, OSV/. The subjects were Hungarian-Russian bilingual preschool children and their Hungarian and Russian monolingual peers. Bever's ‘first noun as agent’ strategy – as indicated by OVS and OSV errors – appears to be weaker in the bilinguals. An explanation for this is proposed in terms of Slobin's ‘attention to the end of words’ factor. The mistaken identification of sentence-initial objects as agents depends on case marking allomorphy. Bilinguals, in general, appear to pay more attention to allomorphy and thus make fewer interpretation errors than their monolingual peers.