Intuitive syllabifications of 50 five- and six- and 50 eight-year-old children are studied in an experimental setting. The children syllabified Dutch disyllabic words with a single intervocalic consonant that were presented orally to them. The aim was to find out if these syllabifications adhered to the universal principles of syllable structure and if the children's syllabifications witnessed an overruling of the universal phonological constraints by language specific ones. Results indicate that universal principles are sufficient to explain syllabifications. Except for obligatory onset formation, other principles act as soft constraints that are influenced by factors such as stress and vowel and consonant quality. A language specific constraint proposed in the phonological literature, namely bimoraic minimality, is hypothesized to be a result of children's familiarization with the spelling conventions.

This longitudinal study was designed to examine the CDI-WORDS Short Form vocabulary checklist (Reznick & Goldsmith, 1989) as an index of language production. In particular, we were curious about: (1) the concurrent associations between the CDI-WORDS Short Form checklist measure and directly observed measures of lexical production; (2) the associations between Short Form checklists administered at different ages; and (3) the predictive associations between Short Form scores and subsequent measures of more general intellectual abilities (i.e. the Wechlser Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence; WPPSIR; Wechsler, 1989). In a sample of 32 children, significant correlations were found between CDI-WORDS Short Form scores and directly observed measures of lexical production at both 1;6 and 2;0. Further, both the Short Form checklist and the observed measure of lexical production were found to predict WPPSI-R Verbal IQ scores but not the Performance IQ scores at 4;0. Additional analyses demonstrated the predictive and convergent validity of the CDI-WORDS Short Form, and underscored the additional value of direct observational measures of lexical production during early lexical development.

Research on categorization suggests that information conveyed by language may be a guide for children performing classification tasks. In our study we asked whether differences between languages in linguistic form influence this performance. Thirty-five three- and four-year-old monolingual speakers of Spanish and English, languages differing in the way they encode gender, were tested in their native countries on a classification task of familiar objects. This task assessed strategies used in (1) a free sort, (2) a sort with instructions to use natural gender, and (3) one (for the Spanish speakers) with specific instructions to use grammatical gender. Half of both the Spanish and the English groups used animacy as a sorting strategy in the first sort, whereas the majority of both groups sorted by natural gender in the second sort. Most Spanish speakers also used grammatical gender as a categorizing strategy in at least one of the sorts. Results suggest that both instructional context and language-specific experience can influence the ways children classify familiar referents.

A longitudinal diary-and-videotape study of the production of phonological segments by a Spanish—English bilingual child, age 1;6–4;6, revealed a consistent separation of the phonological systems of the two languages from the earliest period, with minimal interference at later times. These results are in contrast to results obtained from another child in a similar study (Schnitzer & Krasinski, 1994). The relevance of these data to the issue of whether bilingual children first use a single system before acquiring two discrete languages is discussed, as is the general question of how to interpret the early phonological production of bilinguals.

Observational and checklist measures of vocabulary composition have both recently been used to look at the absolute proportion of nouns in children's early vocabularies. However, they have tended to generate rather different results. The present study is an attempt to investigate the relationship between such measures in a sample of 26 children between 1;1 and 2;1 at approximately 50 and 100 words. The results show that although observational and checklist measures are significantly correlated, there are also systematic quantitative differences between them which seem to reflect a combination of checklist, maternal-report and observational sampling biases. This suggests that, although both kinds of measure may represent good indices of differences in vocabulary size and composition across children and hence be useful as dependent variables in correlational research, neither may be ideal for estimating the absolute proportion of nouns in children's vocabularies. The implication is that questions which rely on information about the absolute proportion of particular kinds of words in children's vocabularies can only be properly addressed by detailed longitudinal studies in which an attempt is made to collect more comprehensive vocabulary records for individual children.

This study examines children's uses of nominal determiners (‘local markings’) and utterance structure (‘global markings’) to introduce new referents. Two narratives were elicited from preschoolers, seven-year-olds, ten-year-olds, and adults in English (N = 80), French (N = 40), German (N = 40), and Chinese (N = 40). Given typological differences (e.g. richness of morphology), these languages rely differentially on local vs. global devices to mark newness: postverbal position is obligatory in Chinese (determiners optional), indefinite determiners in the other languages (position optional). Three findings recur across languages: obligatory newness markings emerge late (seven-year-olds); local markings emerge first, including Chinese optional ones; local and global markings are strongly related. Crosslinguistic differences also occur: English-speaking preschoolers use local markings least frequently; until adult age global markings are rare in English, not contrastive in German and not as frequent in Chinese as in French, despite obligatoriness. It is concluded that three factors determine acquisition: (1) universal discourse factors governing information flow; (2) cognitive factors resulting from the greater functional complexity of global markings; (3) language-specific factors related to how different systems map both grammatical and discourse functions onto forms.

Prior empirical work in semantic development has produced an impressive finding showing that children can reliably detect a modal's relative force (e.g. that must is stronger sounding than may) by five-and-a-half years of age. We investigate the extent to which a representation of relative force can account for an understanding of epistemic modals when their logical meaning is considered (i.e. when modals are interpretable as expressions of necessary and possible conclusions). Experiment 1 presents a replication of Hirst & Weil's hidden-object task, which originally included the supremely forceful indicative is. Thirty-two five-year-olds were required to find a peanut hidden under one of two containers based on a pair of statements that contrasted is with has to, has to with might, or is with might. Half the children were entitled to search for the peanut upon hearing the two statements and half were required to indicate only where they would look. Results largely confirmed the influence of relative force in this paradigm. Both groups of children usually searched under the container associated with the stronger-sounding term. Experiment 2 employed a modified version of the hidden-object task in which contrasts presented one true and one false modal statement and 32 five-year-olds, 20 seven-year-olds, 16 nine-year-olds and 20 adults were asked to determine which of two statements was correct. Half the contrasts presented a relatively weaker-sounding modal term in the true statement and the other half presented equally forceful modal terms in the two statements. No age group systematically endorsed a false stronger-sounding modal statement over a true weaker-sounding one. The five-year-olds' rate of correct responding overall was above levels predicted by chance. Mature logical modal understanding was found among seven-year-olds who routinely endorsed a contrast's true modal statement. These findings suggest that deductive inference is an early semantic component of modal terms.

This study explores the communicative use of the gestural and vocal modalities by normally developing Italian children during the transition from one- to two-word speech. We analysed the spontaneous production of 12 children at 1;4 and at 1;8, focusing on the use of two-element combinations of words and/or gestures. Results indicated that use of gesture and gesture-word combinations during the transition to two-word speech is a robust feature of communicative development across a relatively large number of children in a rich gestural culture, and that the number of gesture-word and two-word combinations increased significantly from 1;4 to 1;8. Number of gestures and gesture-word combinations produced at 1;4 was also predictive of total vocal production at 1;8. Findings are discussed in terms of the role of gesture as a transitional device en route to two-word speech.

If the logic of natural language negation were classical – a simple matter of true and false – then it would be a disaster to answer a question like Is this essay good? with Yes and no. The overwhelming majority of adults (N = 40) asked to resolve this apparent contradiction were found to do so by appealing to the structure of the essay (e.g. Its thesis was good but its argument was not). Three-year-olds (N = 24), when suitably prepared, also appealed to object structure to resolve a similar apparent contradiction. These results are discussed in relation to a non-classical logical model that can handle object structure.

This study investigates how children of different ages talk about a conversation that they have witnessed. 48 Turkish children, five, nine and thirteen years in age, saw a televised dialogue between two Sesame Street characters (Bert and Ernie). Afterward, they narrated what they had seen and heard. Their reports were analysed for the development of linguistic devices used to orient their listeners to the relevant properties of a conversational exchange. Each utterance in the child's narrative was analysed as to its conversational role: (1) whether the child used direct or indirect quotation frames; (2) whether the child marked the boundaries of conversational turns using speakers' names and (3) whether the child used a marker for pairing of utterances made by different speakers (agreement-disagreement, request-refusal, questioning-answering). Within pairings, children's use of (a) the temporal and evaluative connectivity markers and (b) the kind of verb of saying were identified. The data indicate that there is a developmental change in children's ability to use appropriate linguistic means to orient their listeners to the different properties of a conversation. The development and use of these linguistic means enable the child to establish different social roles in a narrative interaction. The findings are interpreted in terms of the child's social-communicative development from being a ‘character’ to becoming a ‘narrator’ and ‘author’ of the reported conversation in the narrative situation.