This diary study describes early phonological and lexical development in a child with chronic otitis media with effusion. Equipped with the tools of a referential/analytic language-learner, the child solved the problem of reduced and fluctuating auditory input with phonological selection and avoidance strategies that capitalized on prosodie cues. This ‘tone-language’ approach resulted in a lexical inventory that would be categorized as an extreme expressive style. Having ‘boot-strapped’ her lexical learning, the child continued to rely on phonological constraints and selection strategies to fuel lexical and syntactic growth, i.e. cross-domain interactions leading to a vocabulary spurt and the onset of two-word utterances. These findings illustrate the need to consider interactions among performance, input and linguistic constraints in order to explain individual variation in language learning.

When children produce regularizations like comed, not all verbs are equally likely to be regularized. Several variables (e.g. lexical frequency) have been shown to be relevant, but not all the variability between verbs is understood. It is argued here that one predictor is which vowels are present in the base form vs. the past tense form. Using a notion of recessive vs. dominant vowel (where recessive vowels are more likely to be replaced by dominant vowels than vice versa) based on adult phonological processing, it is predicted that regularizations should be likely when the base vowel is dominant and unlikely when the past tense vowel is dominant. Data from 17 children reported in the literature, aged 1;6–5;6, show that this prediction is correct. Implications for the role of phonological variables in the processing of irregular past tense forms are discussed.

This paper describes the early lexical development of a group of 328 normal Spanish-speaking children aged 0;8 to 2;7. First the development and structure of a new parent report instrument, Inventario del Desarollo de Habilidades Communcativas is described. Then five studies carried out with the instrument are presented. In the first study vocabulary development of Spanish-speaking infants and toddlers is compared to that of English-speaking infants and toddlers. The English data were gathered using a comparable parental report, the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories. In the second study the general characteristics of Spanish language acquisition, and the effects of various demographic factors on that process, are examined. Study 3 examines the differential effects of three methods of collecting the data (mail-in, personal interview, and clinic waiting room administration). Studies 4 and 5 document the reliability and validity of the instrument. Results show that the trajectories of development are very similar for Spanish-and English-speaking children in this age range, that children from varying social groups develop similarly, and that mail-in and personal interview administration techniques produce comparable results. Inventories administered in a medical clinic waiting room, on the otherhand, produced lower estimates of toddler vocabulary than the other two models.

The present study investigates the possibility that the previously documented relationship between referential–expressive and nominal–pronominal styles (Nelson, 1975) may be best explained not so much in terms of ‘object-orientation’ or ‘noun-preference’, as in terms of the direction from which different children break into structure, with some children tending to construct patterns by combining two or more items from their single-word vocabularies and others tending to develop patterns by gaining productive control over ‘slots’ in previously unanalysed phrases. In order to do so it makes use of a methodology for distinguishing between productive and unanalysed multi-word speech proposed in Lieven, Pine & Dresner-Barnes (1992) which is applied to observational and maternal-report data from a longitudinal study of seven children between the ages of 0; 11 and 1; 8. The results suggest not only that variation in children's early word combinations can indeed be explained in terms of different routes to multi-word speech, but also that, far from being atypical, a strategy involving the breaking down of originally unanalysed phrases may be used by all children, though to varying degrees.

Seventeen of a sample of 30 precocious talkers aged 1;8 produced at least one pronoun reversal (I/you) during unstructured play. This finding led to an examination of the role of cognitive and linguistic individual differences as well as contextual factors and processing complexity as determinants of pronoun reversal. Contrary to predictions derived from previous hypotheses, there were few differences between reversers and non-reversers, other than higher use of second person forms by reversers. Reversals were more likely to occur in certain contexts: semantically reversible predicates with two noun phrases, and in imitations (though the rate of imitation was lower overall in reversers). We propose that pronoun reversals commonly result from a failure to perform a deictic shift, which is especially likely when children's psycholinguistic processing resources are taxed. Children who did not produce any pronoun reversals tended to avoid pronoun use, especially second person forms. Overt reversal may thus reflect a risk-taking approach to language acquisition, which may be particularly characteristic of precocious children.

The role of event knowledge in early language acquisition was investigated. Thirteen two-year-olds were observed interacting with their mothers over a five-week period. During weekly observational sessions, dyads interacted in both a familiar-event context and an unfamiliar-event context. Events were represented by complex toys (e.g. airport, marina, etc.). In the familiar-event, dyads interacted with the same event-toy during each observation period. In the unfamiliar-event, these same dyads interacted with a different novel toy during each observation period. The results indicated that children's increasing event knowledge facilitated their language development. Specifically, children's lexical type use, action verb use, and MLU increased in the familiar-event, but remained unchanged in the unfamiliar-event. Event knowledge also facilitated children's lexical token use. Results are discussed in terms of the role of event knowledge in language acquisition.

These are the principal questions of this study: are the early fonctions of negation, such as REJECTION, and the later emerging DENIAL no developmentally related? And when do children start to deny? So far, evidence for the questions at hand has been almost exclusively observational. We decided on a simple elicitation procedure instead, asking 48 children (ages between 1;1 and 2;7) easy yes/no-questions. The most likely age range for the appearance of denial no was 1;8–2;1. Its error-free acquisition supports the continuity theory of negation development, which holds that essentials of denial no carry over from the earlier fonctions of no. Finally an attempt is made to account for the beginnings of denial in terms of semantics and the representational theory of child cognition.

In different languages children have been found to use past verb forms to express the meaning of ‘unreality’ during social pretend play. In this study, the verb forms used by 14 four-year-old Italian children in their pretend play were investigated. Results show that different Italian past verb forms tend to co-occur with different play activities. The imperfect occurs mainly when children plan and negotiate their pretend activities and marks the transition from a real to a pretend frame of reference. The present perfect occurs mainly when children implement their plans and communicate within a pretend frame that has already been established. Results of this study are discussed in comparison with findings on the pretend language of children speaking other languages.

The study examines children's command of transitivity permutations in Hebrew, where a change in verb-argument syntax entails a change in verb-morphology. 30 children aged two, three and eight were required to produce existing and novel Hebrew verbs differing in transitivity. Younger children showed a good grasp of the syntax and semantics, but not the morphological marking of transitivity, three-year-olds did much better, and eight-year-olds produced mainly adultlike responses. Results were higher on existing verbs than on novel forms. Direction of change had little effect with existing verbs, but with novel verbs success was much higher in changing intransitive to transitive forms than the converse. Some alternations proved easier than others, e.g. intransitive activity verbs in the basic pa'al verb-pattern yielded more causative hif'il forms than intransitive inchoative verbs in the nif'al pattern. Findings throw light on the development of derivational morphology, item-based versus class-based learning, and the impact of lexical productivity and language-particular properties on acquisition.

The speech children spontaneously quote was examined in two studies. In Study 1, a corpus of personal narratives from 96 children aged 4;0 to 9;0 was analysed; Study 2 investigated reported speech in 25 younger children aged 1;2 to 5;2 interacting with their parents. In both studies, the frequency of reported speech increased with age. Direct quotation was more common than indirect or summarized quotation at all ages. In Study 1, children quoted themselves more frequently than any other speaker, and their mothers more frequently than their fathers. Directives were the most commonly reported speech act from the distant past in both older (Study 1) and younger (Study 2) children. In Study 1, girls used reported speech more frequently than did boys, and their quotations were more direct in form than were those of boys.

Poems were elicited from 133 English children between two and six and 171 Italian children between three and seven, using a similar technique, and the results were compared. Both groups produced large numbers of poems. There were great similarities and some differences. The majority of poems in both samples contained phonological devices (mostly rhyme and alliteration) and the proportion was higher (87%) in the Italian sample than in the English sample (59%). The proportion of poems that contained rhyme was close to 45% in each sample, with no consistent age difference in either sample. About one-third of Italian poems and just over a fifth of English poems contained alliteration. The frequency of alliteration declined with age in the English sample but not in the Italian sample. Possible reasons for the differences between the samples are considered. It is argued that the similarities are more important, and their theoretical implications are discussed.

In Pizzuto & Caselli (1992, hereafter: P&C) we provided an overview of morphological development in Italian, focusing on three aspects of free speech production (verbs, pronouns and articles), in the longitudinal records of three children. We analysed our data using criteria appropriate to allow reliable cross-linguistic comparisons with data from English. By this means we evaluated the plausibility of a nativist, parameter-setting account of language development in Italian and English, as proposed for these two languages by Hyams (1986a b; 1987; 1988). We concluded that our data did not support the strong predictions made within such a parameter-setting account, and that the developmental patterns observed were best explained by a combination of cognitive, perceptual and distributional factors of the sort that are proposed in most other models of language acquisition.