Conventional and displaced uses of pronouns in maternal speech to refer to the baby were investigated in a developmental study of six mother—infant dyads using video-recordings of their free play at three, seven and ten months. These pronominal uses were analysed in a number of semantic contexts to determine how interactive situations influence the use of different types of pronouns. Results show that third- and first-person pronouns occur significantly more often in the semantic context of affect-oriented activities than in the semantic context of goal-directed activities. For second-person pronouns the results are the opposite. The contrast found between these two contexts, i.e. where the child is presented as the agent of a meaningful activity or not, shows how the place constructed for the baby as an interlocutor in maternal speech evolves with age. This study underlines the part the third person plays with its descriptive value in the acquisition of the system of pronouns.

A cross-cultural investigation of the influence of target-language in babbling was carried out. 1047 vowels produced by twenty 10-month-old infants from Parisian French, London English, Hong Kong Cantonese and Algiers Arabic language backgrounds were recorded in the cities of origin and spectrally analysed. F1-F2 plots of these vowels were obtained for each subject and each language group. Statistical analyses provide evidence of differences between infants across language backgrounds. These differences parallel those found in adult speech in the corresponding languages. Implications of an early build-up of target-language-oriented production skills are discussed.

This study compares the prosodie modifications in mothers' and fathers' speech to preverbal infants in French, Italian, German, Japanese, British English, and American English. At every stage of data collection and analysis, standardized procedures were used to enhance the comparability across data sets that is essential for valid cross-language comparison of the prosodie features of parental speech. In each of the six language groups, five mothers and five fathers were recorded in semi-structured home observations while speaking to their infant aged 0; 10–1;2 and to an adult. Speech samples were instrumentally analysed to measure seven prosodic parameters: mean fundamental frequency (f0), f0-minimum, f0-maximum, f0-range, f0-variability, utterance duration, and pause duration. Results showed cross-language consistency in the patterns of prosodic modification used in parental speech to infants. Across languages, both mothers and fathers used higher mean-f0, f0-minimum, and f0-maximum, greater f0-variability, shorter utterances, and longer pauses in infant-directed speech than in adult-directed speech. Mothers, but not fathers, used a wider f0-range in speech to infants. American English parents showed the most extreme prosodic modifications, differing from the other language groups in the extent of intonational exaggeration in Speech to infants. These results reveal common patterns in caretaker's use of intonation across languages, which may function developmentally to regulate infant arousal and attention, to communicate affect, and to facilitate speech perception and language comprehension. In addition to providing evidence for possibly universal prosodic features of speech to infants, these results suggest that language-specific variations are also important, and that the findings of the numerous studies of early language input based on American English are not necessarily generalisable to other cultures.

The present paper presents data on the phonetic development of four normal Swedish infants, who were audiorecorded bi-weekly in their homes from 0;1 to 1;5. Our results show five distinct stages in the development of early vocalizations: the glottal stage, the velar/uvular stage, the vocalic stage, the reduplicated consonant babbling stage and the variegated consonant babbling stage. The results are based on auditory analysis of selected parts of the material. A comparison is made of this developmental pattern with studies of infants raised in other linguistic communities. The results of this comparison support the claim that babbling follows a universal developmental pattern.

When carefully assessed and analysed, parent report can provide a valuable overall evaluation of children's language at 20 months. Norming information and validity coefficients are presented here for a vocabulary checklist assessment included in the Early Language Inventory. Normative data are provided for fullterm, preterm, and precocious samples, including selected vocabulatory subsets that are indicative of early language learning style. The vocabulary checklist has substantial validity as indexed by correlations with the Bayley Scales of Infant Development and particularly with a language subscale derived from that test.

Speech samples from eight British female adults addressing young children and another adult were analysed in terms of vocal pitch. Increases in vocal pitch when addressing young children were observed but were smaller than the increases noted by North American researchers, and variability across speakers was marked. Some adults only slightly raised their vocal pitch to young children. Pitch increases were generally more marked for mean as against modal pitch measures, and for free speech as against reading aloud conditions.

The present study focuses on the effects of contextual demands on the selection of a particular syntactic device, in asking whether French-speaking children from 4 to 10 years old will spontaneously produce it-cleft sentences if there is a functional necessity arising from the context. Taking into account recent studies that have specified the discourse function(s) served by this marked sentence form, it was hypothesized that the cleft formulation would be more likely than its uncleft counterpart whenever the child's intention was to contrast their own belief or knowledge with that of their addressee. The study showed this to be the case when the matter of the disagreement concerned the agent of an action: that situation elicited an overwhelming majority (from 80% to 97%) of cleft constructions, even from the youngest children. On the other hand, when the matter of the disagreement concerned the patient, there were only a few cleft constructions, even with the oldest children; contrastive stress on the object constituent was the predominant device employed for marking information in that situation. The high proportion of clefts in the Agent condition, and the high proportion of stressed object constituents in the Patient condition, both differ from previously reported data. These differences are discussed with reference to differences in task requirements and to differences between the prosodie constraints of French and English.

A number of researchers have argued that phonological constraints may influence the emergence and form of combinatorial speech in children. Donahue (1986) presented evidence that one child's consonant harmony constraint operated across word boundaries. This paper presents further evidence for the operation of word-level phonological constraints in multi-word utterances. Selection and avoidance patterns as well as her modifications of adult forms indicate the presence of a syllable sequencing constraint in this child's grammar: an initial syllable must begin with a consonant whose sonority value is not less than that of the following syllable. The same constraint governs the form of her early word combinations. The existence of evidence for the operation of word-level constraints in word combinations, it is pointed out, has consequences for how we interpret two-lexicon models of phonological development.

We propose (contra Hyams, 1986) that the optional subject phenomenon in early child language arises because children have not yet acquired the morphological elements (primarily modals and tense) necessary to distinguish Subject-Taking (ST) verbs (e.g. finite verbs) from their non-Subject-Taking (NST) counterparts (e.g. infinitives). Unaware of this distinction, children are able only to observe that verbs sometimes occur with subjects and sometimes without. We show that our proposal makes a number of developmental predictions which we then test with the help of longitudinal data from three children. We conclude that: (i) There is no systematic morphological distinction between ST and NST verbs during the optional subject stage (OSS). (2) The emergence of the distinction between ST and NST verbs is gradual rather than sudden. (3) There is variation from child to child in terms of which morphologically-defined subclass of verbs is first recognized as subject-taking. (4) There is no link between the emergence of modals or contracted copulas and the end of the OSS.

The present study examines the relationship between linguistic forms and the functions they serve in children's early talk about agentivity and control. The spontaneous linguistic productions of six children ranging between 1;8 and 2;8 served as the data base. Preliminary analyses of who the children referred to and what forms were used in subject position suggest that the children could be divided into two groups. Three children primarily referred to Self and relied on multiple Self reference forms in subject position, while the other children referred to both Self and Other and primarily used the Self reference form, I. A functional analysis was carried out to examine whether the seemingly interchangeable use of Self reference forms could be related to semantic and pragmatic patterns. The findings indicate that at a time before they regularly refer to others, the children systematically employed different Self reference forms to mark distinct perspectives on agency.

Hirsh-Pasek, Treiman & Schneiderman (1984).and Demetras, Post & Snow (1986).have recently suggested that certain types of parental repetitions and clarification questions may provide children with subtle cues to their grammatical errors. We further investigated this possibility by examining parental responses to inflectional over-regularizations and wh-question auxiliary-verb omission errors in the sets of transcripts from Adam, Eve and Sarah (Brown 1973). These errors were chosen because they are exemplars of overgeneralization, the type of mistake for which negative information is, in theory, most critically needed. Expansions and Clarification Questions occurred more often following ill-formed utterances in Adam's and Eve's input, but not in Sarah's. However, these corrective responses formed only a small proportion of all adult responses following Adam's and Eve's grammatical errors. Moreover, corrective responses appear to drop out of children's input while they continue to make overgeneralization errors. Whereas negative feedback may occasionally be available, in the light of these findings the contention that language input generally incorporates negative information appears to be unfounded.

The function of motherese has become a pivotal issue in the language-learning literature. The current research takes the approach of asking whether the prosodic characteristics that are distinctive to motherese could play a special role in facilitating the acquisition of syntax. Hirsh-Pasek, Kemler Nelson, Jusczyk, Cassidy, Druss & Kennedy (1987) showed that infants aged 0;7–0;10 are sensitive to prosodic cues that would help them segment the speech stream into perceptual units that correspond to clauses. The present study shows that infants' sensitivity to segment-marking cues in ongoing speech holds for motherese but not for adult-directed speech. The finding is that, for motherese only, infants orient longer to speech that has been interrupted at clausal boundaries than to matched speech that has been interrupted at within-clause locations. This selective preference indicates that the prosodie qualities of motherese provide infants with cues to units of speech that correspond to grammatical units of language – a potentially fundamental contribution of motherese to the learning of syntax.

Recent controversy about the innateness of language has awakened interest in the genetic basis of linguistic development. In this study, we analysed more extensively data from Mather & Black (1984).in order to test the hypothesis that the speech articulation of monozygotic (MZ) twins would be qualitatively more similar than that of age- and sex-matched dizygotic (DZ) twins. Analyses revealed that 4–year-old MZ twin pairs were significantly more likely to misproduce the same sounds on an articulation test than were DZ twin pairs, and that DZ twins were no more likely to share errors than were children who were both genetically and environmentally unrelated. There was no evidence that MZ twins made more similar errors than DZ twins, and indeed it was difficult to make this determination since only broad categories of error (substitution, distortion, omission) were available for analysis. The greater amount of genetic material shared by MZ twins, and the presumably more similar morphology of their speech mechanisms, may have caused certain sound patterns to be of more nearly equal difficulty for both members of a MZ pair. However, these findings need to be confirmed with phonetically more detailed analyses.

Polysynthetic languages can present special extraction puzzles to children, due to the length of their words. A number of hypotheses concerning children's strategies for acquiring morphology, originally proposed on the basis of their approaches to somewhat simpler systems, are confirmed by observations of five children acquiring Mohawk. Among the Mohawk children, the earliest segmentation of words was phonological rather than morphological: stressed syllables, usually penultimate or antepenultimate, were extracted first. Ultimate syllables were then added, confirming the salience of the ends of words. During this time, distinctions expressed by adults in affixes were either omitted or expressed analytically. Acquisition then moved leftward by syllables. When most utterances were long enough to include pronominal prefixes as well as roots, morphological structure was apparently discovered. It is not surprising that the pronouns should trigger this awareness, since they are frequent, appearing with every verb and most nouns, they are functional, and they are semantically transparent. From this point on, the children acquired affixes primarily according to their utility and semantic transparency rather than their phonological shape or position.

This paper sets out to examine two findings reported in the literature: one, that during the one-word stage a child's word productions are highly phonetically variable, and two, that the one-word stage is qualitatively distinct from subsequent phonological development. The complete set of word forms produced by a child at the one-word stage were collected and analysed both cross-sectionally (month by month) and longitudinally (looking for changes over time). It was found that the data showed very little variability, and that phonological development during the period studied was qualitatively continuous with subsequent development. It is suggested that the phonologically principled development of this child's first words is related to his late onset of speech.

The acquisition of verb inflections in Tamil, an agglutinating language, was investigated in three 2-year-old children. The findings revealed a high percentage use of verb inflections indicating tense, aspect, modality, person, number and gender by all three children. Explanations for this early, almost error-free acquisition are discussed in terms of the facilitating properties of agglutinating languages.

The evolution of young children's categories, as measured by category name production, was studied. The focus was on categories whose names initially were overextended. Four children (initially aged 1; 1 to 1; 3) were visited at home twice a week over a four- to six-month period, until they were approximately 1;7. The play sessions included eli-citations of the names of specially chosen objects. Results indicated that, as predicted, four sequences of category evolution were found, formed by the intersection of two factors: overlap vs. mutual exclusivity and first re-assignment separate vs. first re-assignment joint. As expected, most sequences involved initial overlap, and the choice of first reassignment option varied as a function of the relationship (hierarchical or non-hierarchical) between the initial child-basic category and the new category.

We describe the development of a set of five equivalent checklists to assess word production of children in their second year. The words on each list do not overlap, but represent comparable levels of difficulty. Thus, individual lists may be used to estimate the child's production vocabulary, and the set of lists may be used serially in a longitudinal design.

A validation study on 25 infants suggests that the five lists produce comparable mean production scores, reflect differences in age, and preserve individual differences in total production and production of linguistic categories such as nouns, verbs, open class items, and closed class items. This finding provides further support for the reliability of parental report instruments in this developmental domain.

The Acquisition Of Complement Phrasal Constructions In Korean Is Examined In Spontaneous Speech Data From Two Children, Who Were Observed From One And A Half To Three Years Of Age. In Spite Of Typological Differences Between English And Korean, Both Syntactic And Semantic Characteristics are found to be shared by children acquiring complement constructions in the two languages. however, certain language-specific features of korean complement structures make it possible to address theoretical points concerning the structure of infinitival complements which cannot be resolved with the acquisition data on English. The error pattern in the acquisition of certain ‘subject-equi’ verbs in Korean poses problems both for LEG and GB accounts of the constituent structure of infinitival complements and the acquisition of those constructions. On the basis of the Korean data, I propose that base-generated VP complements are acquired first, with semantically motivated reanalysis of previously acquired infinitival complement structures occurring at a later stage.

This study concerns the acquisition of complex sentences with perception and epistemic verbs that take a second verb in their complements. The acquisition of complementation began between two and three years of age in this longitudinal study of four children's spontaneous speech. The results of the study showed that (1) complement types and complementizer connectives and (2) the discourse contexts in which complementation occurred were specific to individual matrix verbs. The most frequent verbs acquired were the perception verbs see and look and the epistemic verbs think and know. Developments in both discourse and syntax indicated that these verbs expressed attitudes of certainty/uncertainty toward the content expressed in their complements. The results are discussed in terms of both linguistic and psychological factors in the acquisition of complex sentences with complementation.