A methodological study was designed to investigate two aspects of children's language knowledge and children's uses of pictures and objects when demonstrating their language skills. Sixty-eight 4- and 5-year-olds were randomly assigned to one of six treatment groups, matched for SES, sex, and age. Subjects were individually tested with one of the six measures: language comprehension using object stimuli; comprehension with picture stimuli; comprehension where there were choices among object stimuli; language production using object stimuli; production with picture stimuli; or production with choices among the object stimuli. Main effects for stimulus medium and response mode were both significant, as well as the interaction. The discussion is oriented towards the developmental controversy around receptive and productive language skills and the impact of the representational medium upon performance in assessment tasks.

Recent research on single-word language has focused on the acquisition of object words, considering relational words such as more, allgone, here, and up only peripherally. These words are considered in relation to the operative schemes of sensorimotor intelligence as suggested by Sinclair (1970). Relational words, like syntactic structure, appear to develop and exist apart from specific content. Study of such words helps clarify the relationship between sensorimotor understandings and the language of the pre-operational child. Data spanning the entire single-word period from five subjects provide an empirical base for analysing the meanings of these words in use. A model is then proposed for considering relational words as coding a set of interrelated meanings reflecting the cognitive organization of the late sensorimotor period.

TURNABOUTS, which both respond to and require a response from the other (either verbal or nonverbal), were produced more than twice as often by mothers as by their children at 2; 2 and 2; 6, in videotaped dialogues during semi-structured play. The 27 mothers showed stable individual differences in this aspect of their turn-taking, across situations and across time. Children tended to take a reciprocal role rather than an imitative one within the immediate situation: if a mother produced many mands, her child produced few. At 2; 10 the children were tested for language comprehension, puzzle-solving and conversational engagement with an investigator. Mothers' mands at the earlier ages appeared to have a negative effect upon these measures, even when social class differences were controlled; but causal interpretations were complicated by the fact that language production measures also predicted the 2; 10 cognitive measures.

The structure of contingent query sequences within adult–child discourse was examined. The children, aged 1; 11–3; 0 in language stages I–III, demonstrated basic knowledge of the contingent query. Implications for conceptualizations of the young child's communicative competence and for theoretical formulations of the query sequence itself are discussed.

This study is an attempt to trace the acquisition of consonant clusters by Telugu children. Phonemic inventories are given for each of the children for a clear picture of their acquisitional stage. It was found that reduction, substitution and assimilation played major roles in cluster acquisition. Co-occurrence restrictions and hierarchical application of the three phonological processes were noted. Results of this study are compared with similar works on Indian languages and English, and differences are pointed out.

The pronoun system provides a fruitful area for investigating the conditions under which children make linguistic generalizations. Pronouns are defined by a complex of semantic, syntactic, and morphological distinctions whose interaction is only partially consistent. In the course of acquiring them, children often make systematic errors which reflect novel generalizations from the adult input. A distributional analysis was applied to the errors made by 48 children in marking distinctions of person, possession, and case in their spontaneous use of pronouns. The analysis indicated that children do not make maximal generalizations which extend a particular feature to all related contexts. Rather, they acquire specific complexes of features, and are quite conservative in extrapolating from one feature complex to another.

Research on the learning of verb-forms in English has consistently reported the late acquisition of the PRESENT PERFECT. Explanations for this have been in terms of children's cognitive abilities. Difficulties are presented for such explanations by an apparent discrepancy between American English (AE) and British English (BE) acquisition data. This paper examines in detail the forms included in the PRESENT PERFECT paradigm, and the use of these and related forms by a sample of BE children aged 3; 3. While there is considerable variability across the sample, the results indicate that BE children at this age have not in any sense mastered the present perfect. The implications of this are discussed.

Research has indicated that both the lexical content and the discourse structure of the experimental instructions in traditional conservation tasks enhance task difficulty. Investigations of the comprehension of the relational terms more, less, same and different have revealed significant discourse and task demand effects upon comprehension strategies and cast doubt upon strong versions of hypotheses derived from linguistic marking theory. Five experiments were carried out on children aged between 3 and 6 years. Results were consistent with the following claims: (a) young children do not necessarily understand less to mean more, but do confuse the meanings of same and different; (b) function-based strategies of comprehension are superseded in development by attribute-based strategies for relating discourses to represented referents.

Sixty 3- to 6-year-old children were tested in order to assess certain aspects of their ability to answer questions alluding to hypothetical events. Each child was asked four hypothetical questions from each of four topic areas: (1) past-parent, (2) past-fantasy, (3) future-parent and (4) future-fantasy. Although correct responses increased with age for each of the four categories, children more often responded correctly to future hypothetical questions than to past hypothetical questions and to hypothetical questions involving fantasy characters than to hypothetical questions involving the children's parents. Moreover, the interaction of the past-future and parent-fantasy factors yielded an overall pattern of difficulty for the four topic areas. These findings are discussed in terms of the factors which influence the development of hypothetical reference skills.

Evidence produced by Chomsky (1969) has suggested that 5-year-old children comprehend the verb tell more easily than the verb ask. This paper analyses the interpersonal context of appropriate use of these verbs and reports the results of two comprehension experiments with 5-year-olds. The first experiment, in attempting to correct an apparent methodological weakness in Chomsky's study, reverses her results and elicits a significantly higher frequency of correct responses to the verb ask than the verb tell: the second experiment demonstrates that this age group can consistently identify the speech acts to which the words ask and tell refer. The results are interpreted as support for the conclusion that 5-year-olds can comprehend the meaning of ask and tell, but that their linguistic comprehension is easily dominated by contextual and interpersonal expectations.

The ability to differentiate the directive senses of ask and tell was investigated using a production task in an experimental setting with children between the ages of 2; 6 and 6; 6. Results showed that the children at all ages distinguished the verbs along dimensions sensitive to adult ratings of politeness. There was a trend towards increased politeness with age under ask instructions, but not with tell instructions. Analyses of structural features of the directives produced showed that the interrogative form was more likely to be used with ask instructions, as was the word please, while tell instructions elicited the imperative, with less frequent use of please. The findings suggest that children before the age of 7; 0 are able to differentiate the illocutionary forces of utterances which have the same communicative intention.

This study investigated the development of noun definition by grade school children and adults (N = 100). Subjects were asked to define 15 common nouns in one of two conditions: with objects present or without objects present. Definitions were classified on the basis of perceptual attributes (CONCRETE), everyday usage (FUNCTIONAL) or a combination of these (COMBINATORIAL). Results were analysed with a 5 (Grade) × 2 (Condition × 3 (Category) Analysis of Variance which indicated no effects for condition, but a Grade × Category interaction. With increasing age, there was a shift from FUNCTIONAL to COMBINATORIAL definitions; CONCRETE definitions were infrequent for all grades. In addition, age changes were found in the forms of the definitions subjects produced. In contrast to the children, adults formulated definitions in a more complex Aristotelian form. It was concluded that noun definition is a metalinguistic ability which follows a course of development similar to that for the acquisition of word meaning.