We investigated two main components of infant declarative pointing, reference and attitude, in two experiments with a total of 106 preverbal infants at 1;0. When an experimenter (E) responded to the declarative pointing of these infants by attending to an incorrect referent (with positive attitude), infants repeated pointing within trials to redirect E’s attention, showing an understanding of E’s reference and active message repair. In contrast, when E identified infants’ referent correctly but displayed a disinterested attitude, infants did not repeat pointing within trials and pointed overall in fewer trials, showing an understanding of E’s unenthusiastic attitude about the referent. When E attended to infants’ intended referent AND shared interest in it, infants were most satisfied, showing no message repair within trials and pointing overall in more trials. These results suggest that by twelve months of age infant declarative pointing is a full communicative act aimed at sharing with others both attention to a referent and a specific attitude about that referent.

This work aims to analyse the specific contribution of social abilities (here considered as the capacity for attributing knowledge to others) in a particular communicative context. 74 normally developing children (aged 3;4 to 5;9, M=4·6) were given two Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks, which are considered to assess increasing complexity levels of epistemic state attribution: Attribution of knowledge-ignorance (Pillow, 1989; adapted by Welch-Ross, 1997) and Understanding of False-belief (Baron Cohen, Leslie & Frith, 1985). Subjects were paired according to their age and level of performance in ToM tasks. These dyads participated in a referential communication task specially designed for this research. The resulting communicative interchanges were analysed using a three-level category system (pragmatic functions, descriptive accuracy, and ambiguity of messages). The results showed significant differences among subjects with different levels of social comprehension regarding the type of communicative resources used by them in every category level. In particular, understanding of false belief seems to be the most powerful predictor of changes in the children’s development of communicative competence.

This paper focuses on four strategies of onset reduction employed by a single child (4;0–4;4) acquiring Polish: deletion, coalescence, metathesis, and gemination. Deletion and coalescence occur in word-initial onsets while metathesis and gemination are restricted to word-medial position. The data, which constitute an intriguing ‘conspiracy’ case (Kisseberth, 1970), are analysed within OPTIMALITY THEORY (henceforth, OT; Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004; McCarthy & Prince, 1995) in which all surface-true ‘processes’ are motivated through the interaction of ranked and violable constraints. The OT account makes it possible to envisage the four strategies as different surface responses to the undominated *COMPLEXOnset which militates against onset clusters. The choice of a particular strategy as well as its restriction to a particular word position is not random but follows from the interplay between *COMPLEXOnset, sonority-based syllable structure constraints (Margin Hierarchy, CONTACT LAW), context-sensitive markedness constraints (CODA CONDITION, *Nasal–Fricative) and faithfulness constraints. The present study confirms previous sonority-based findings, supplies further evidence for universal sonority mechanisms from word-medial clusters, and points to the coexistence of child-specific and abstract adult-based phonological strategies in the child’s system.

P. Bloom's (1990) data on subject omission are often taken as strong support for the view that child language can be explained in terms of full competence coupled with processing limitations in production. This paper examines whether processing limitations in learning may provide a more parsimonious explanation of the data without the need to assume full competence. We extended P. Bloom’s study by using a larger sample (12 children) and measuring subject omission phenomena in three developmental phases. The results revealed a Verb Phrase-length effect consistent with that reported by P. Bloom. However, contrary to the predictions of the processing limitations account, the proportion of overt subjects that were pronominal increased with developmental phase. The data were simulated with MOSAIC, a computational model that learns to produce progressively longer utterances as a function of training. MOSAIC was able to capture all of the effects reported by P. Bloom through a resource-limited distributional analysis of child-directed speech. Since MOSAIC does not have any built-in linguistic knowledge, these results show that the phenomena identified by P. Bloom do not constitute evidence for underlying competence on the part of the child. They also underline the need to develop more empirically grounded models of the way that processing limitations in learning might influence the language acquisition process.

Our previous research showed that Russian children commit fewer gender-agreement errors with diminutive nouns than with their simplex counterparts. Experiment 1 replicates this finding with Russian children (N=24, mean 3;7, range 2;10–4;6). Gender agreement was recorded from adjective usage as children described animal pictures given just their names, varying in derivational status (diminutive/simplex), novelty, and gender. Experiment 2 extends the gender-agreement elicitation methodology developed for Russian to Serbian, a language with similar morphosyntactic structure but considerably fewer diminutives in child-directed speech. Serbian children (N=22, mean age 3;8, range 3;0–4;1), exhibited an advantage for diminutive nouns of almost the same magnitude as the Russian children. The fact that the diminutive advantage was found in a language with a low frequency of diminutives in the input suggests that morphophonological homogeneity of word clusters and membership in dense neighbourhoods are important factors that contribute to the reduction of inflectional errors during language development.

The production of third-person /s/ on English verbs seems to be ahead of comprehension. Mainstream American English (MAE) is contrasted with African American English (AAE), in which /s/ is rarely supplied. Two studies explored what information children get solely from /s/ on the end of a verb. Sixty-five MAE- and 65 AAE-speaking four- to seven-year-olds participated in one of two experimental picture-choice comprehension studies. Neither group of four-year-olds could use the /s/ to determine if the event was generic rather than past tense on a verb (e.g. cuts/cut), or whether it was a verb or a noun compound as in The penguin dresses/The penguin dress. MAE-speakers do not use the information in third-person /s/ alone until age five, and not reliably until age six years. In keeping with AAE production, AAE-speaking children do not use the information in /s/ at all in this age range.

This study examined two- (n=10) and three-year-old (n=16) French–English bilingual children’s repairs of breakdowns in communication that occurred when they did not use the same language as their interlocutor (Language breakdowns) and for other reasons (e.g. inaudible utterance). The children played with an experimenter who used only one language (English or French) during the play session. Each time a child used the other language, the experimenter made up to five requests for clarification, from non-specific (What?) to specific (Can you say that in French/English?). The experimenter also made requests for clarification when breakdowns occurred for other reasons, e.g. the child spoke too softly, produced an ambiguous utterance, etc. Both the two- and three-year-olds were capable of repairing Language breakdowns by switching languages to match that of their experimenter and they avoided this repair strategy when attempting to repair Other breakdowns. Moreover, they switched languages in response to non-specific requests. The results indicate that even two-and-a-half-year-old bilingual children are capable of identifying their language choice as a cause of communication breakdowns and that they can differentiate Language from Other kinds of communication breakdowns.

This study examined 32 children’s (M age=1;8 years) engagement in joint attention (JA) and the relation between JA and vocabulary size across mother–child (MC) and mother–child–sibling (MCS) contexts. In the MCS context, mothers engaged in JA more with one child than both children; they engaged in less JA with target child than they did in the MC context. JA style was generally unrelated across the contexts. Coordinated JA and children’s vocabulary were significantly related only for the MCS context. Findings suggest the number of social partners influences JA dynamics and multi-child contexts can be positive language learning environments.