The role of babbling in language development is not well understood. One source of evidence is the utterances of infants who were tracheostomized during the period in which they would normally have produced syllabic vocalization. We describe here the phonetic patterns and linguistic development of a girl called Jenny. She was tracheostomized and generally aphonic from 0;5–1;8 but cognitively and socially normal, with near-normal comprehension of language. Acoustic analyses of Jenny's utterances following decannulation revealed a tenth of the canonical syllables which might be expected in normally developing infants, an extremely small inventory of consonant-like segments, and a marked preference for labial obstruents. In these ways, she resembled a group of infants of the same age who also cannot hear their oral-motor movements, the congenitally deaf, suggesting that the audibility of babbling contributes to its onset. Two months following decannulation, when Jenny was 1;10, she produced only a handful of different words. We think this is because aphonia prevented her from discovering the referential value of vocal expression and discouraged the formation of a phonetic repertoire that could be appropriated for lexical service. This unusual case suggests that babbling normally facilitates the development of language and speech.

This study examines the development of word order patterns in Irish, a strict VSO language. It was found that the three children studied used subject-initial utterances considerably more frequently than adults in input, and that in both adult and child the elision of the verb ‘to be’ played a significant role. Another significant factor was found to be the different restrictions on main verbs and verbal nouns with regard to the subject: in neutral sentences the main verb always precedes the subject, while the verbal noun always follows it. The Bates & MacWhinney (1979). hypothesis that early verb initialization results from a tendency to place new information before given information was also investigated.

Cognitive complexity and complexity of linguistic structure have been found to influence the order of acquisition of locatives. In Warlpiri, locative terms are nominals and they are used in combination with a locative case marker on the reference object; directional affixes may be added to them. Data from a series of tests of Warlpiri children's comprehension and production of the Warlpiri expressions that may be translated as ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘under’, ‘in front of’, ‘behind’ and ‘between’ indicate that the locative case forms are used first without the more specific locative nominals; young children distinguish an ‘up-down’ dimension but not ‘in’, and the reference object influences how the locative term is interpreted; kamparru-pirdangirli (‘front-behind’) is not one dimension for children aged four to five years; kulkurru ‘between’ is understood before kamparru ‘front’ and pirdangirli ‘behind’; the use of features on a reference object for orientation develops at around six, but the orientation of the reference object, as well as features on the placed object may affect interpretation.

Counter to findings in English, German and Hebrew, recent acquisition studies have shown that the passive is acquired early in several non-Indo-European languages. In an attempt to explain this phenomenon, this paper addresses certain typological phenomena which influence the early acquisition of passives in Sesotho, a southern Bantu language. After outlining the structure of the Sesotho passive and its syntactic and discourse functions, I examine Sesotho-speaking children's spontaneous use of passives, showing that the acquisition of passives in Sesotho is closely linked to the fact that Sesotho subjects must be discourse topics. I conclude that a detailed examination of how passive constructions interact with other components of a given linguistic system is critical for developing a coherent and universally applicable theory of how passives are acquired.

The present study compared four categories of maternal utterances that were found in a previous study (Hoff-Ginsberg, 1986) to predict children's rates of syntax development to a category of maternal utterances that was unrelated to syntax development. The comparisons were designed to test the hypotheses that maternal utterances which benefit syntax development do so by providing syntactically rich data or by eliciting conversation from the child. Data-providing and conversation-eliciting characteristics of the selected categories of maternal utterances were assessed from the same transcripts of 22 mothers interacting with their 2½-year-old children that had provided the database for the earlier study of predictive relations. Each of the three positive predictor categories of maternal utterances differed from the unrelated category — in more frequently illustrating the affected aspect of syntax development, in eliciting more speech from the child, or both. Neither of these characteristics was true of the negative predictor category. The pattern of results suggested that maternal speech supports the child's development of syntax by engaging the child in linguistic interaction and also by providing illustrations of the structures the child acquires.

The aim of this study is to examine how caretakers speak to young children in a day-care centre and particularly to investigate how they adjust their language, according to children's age and to size of groups. Five Italian teachers were observed, each one during six different sessions. Children's ages were 0;10–1;2 and 2;6–3;0. The number of children varied from a rather large group (seven children) to a small group (three children) to a single child. Language was taperecorded during free-play sessions of ten minutes. Context was noted by two observers. Transcripts were analysed according to structural features (syntactical complexity, redundancy, type-token ratio, speed) and functional features (proportion of utterances with different purpose: control and organization of child behaviour, empathy, conversation and teaching). Results show some significant differences in structure and function according to children's age and group size.

In this study we compared the conversations of mothers and fathers with their children at 1;3 and 159, with special attention to breakdown-repair sequences. We found that, overall, children and secondary caregiver fathers experienced more communicative breakdowns than did children and primary caregiver mothers. More specifically, fathers requested clarification of their children more often than did mothers, and they most often used a non-specific query (e.g. What?). Mothers used more specific queries (e.g. Put it where?) and were involved in more ‘looped’ sequences involving multiple requests for clarification. Fathers also failed to acknowledge child utterances more often than did mothers. After a father non-acknowledgement, children tended not to persist and when they did they often received further non-acknowledgements; the dyad did not often return to the child's original topic. After a maternal non-acknowledgement, on the other hand, children persisted and the dyad more often returned to its previous topic. The results are interpreted as support for the Bridge Hypothesis which claims that fathers present children with communicative challenges that help prepare them for communication with less familiar adults.

Young children's competence in using and responding to clarification requests may reflect their desire to achieve goals through the direction of others rather than knowledge that messages must be understood by another mind. This possibility was addressed by examining miscommunication episodes between children aged 2;6 and their parents in videotaped free play sessions. Although the children generally responded appropriately in form to parental clarification requests, they responded more often to and resolved successfully more of those following their own requests than those following their assertions. Thus, the results support the idea that young children are frequently motivated to repair their utterances when they have not achieved some overt behaviour desired from others. These findings are discussed in the light of the conversational experience two-year-olds bring to clarification situations.

This paper presents a case study of second-language acquisition of Hebrew via immersion in daycare between 1;10 and 3;0. A period of silence was followed by rapid onset of L2 production simultaneously with many references to language itself. Eight types of language awareness were identified, and of these, several types may be prerequisites for starting L2 production. The nature of L2 speech during the first stages of production suggests that to crack the sematic code of L2, the child relies on identifiable contingencies between utterances and subsequent behaviours by speakers and listeners. As a result there are many more imperatives and interrogatives in L2 than are evident in L1 speech, and these appear to be learned by rote in an unanalysed manner. The transition to complex constructions occurs via the juxtaposition of known but syntactically unanalysed chunks, and results in patterns of syntactic errors similar to those of adult second-language learners. Reliance on L1 as a fall-back strategy was also evident. Several implications of these data for cognitive development in general are discussed.

The transition from slow to rapid word-learning was examined in a longitudinal study of 18 children. Beginning at age 1;2, mothers kept a diary of children's words. Diary entries were discussed during phone calls to the home every 2½ weeks. A chronological record of nouns and other word classes was coded from the diary records.

Thirteen children evidenced a prolonged period of up to three months during which rate of acquisition markedly increased. Almost threequarters of the words learned during this period were nouns. Five children evidenced more gradual word-learning, and acquired a balance of nouns and other word classes. These results suggest that the terms ‘vocabulary spurt’ and ‘naming explosion’ best describe children who focus their early linguistic efforts on a single strategy: learning names for things. Other children may attempt to encode a broad range of experience with a more varied lexicon, a strategy that results in more gradual lexical growth.

Comprehension of metaphor in preschoolers was studied through an elicited repetition task. Subjects were 52 children aged 3;0 to 5;2. Repetition performance on metaphors was compared to repetitions of semantically well-formed literal sentences as well as semantically anomalous sentences, all matched for length, vocabulary and sentence structure. Accuracy on literal and metaphoric stimuli was comparable, and both were significantly better than performance on anomalous sentences. There were no effects for age or sex. It was shown that the metaphors were not semantically anomalous to the children and that they were processed on a par with literal language. The argument is advanced from a review of the literature that imitation implicates understanding of the material imitated. If metaphor is thus shown to emerge early in the child's linguistic repertory, figurative language, it may be argued, occupies a more central position in linguistic theory than it has been accorded.

Similarity neighbourhoods for words in young children's lexicons were investigated using three computerized databases. These databases were representative of three groups of native English speakers: 5-year-olds, 7-year-olds, and adults. Computations relating to the similarity neighbourhoods of words in the children's and adult's lexicon revealed that words in the 5- and 7-year-olds' lexicons have many fewer similar neighbours than the same words analyzed in the adult lexicon. Thus, young children may employ more global recognition strategies because words are more discriminable in memory. The neighbourhood analyses provide a number of insights into the processes of auditory word recognition in children and the possible structural organization of words in the young child's mental lexicon.

Two studies were conducted to examine children's understanding of three terms that denote different degrees of likelihood: possibly, probably and definitely. In Study 1, children in preschool, and first, third and fourth grade completed a comparison task involving pairs of likelihood terms. Twelve stories were created that described the likelihood that each of two children would participate in an activity, and subjects judged which of the two children actually participated. In Study 2, children in preschool, and first, third and fifth grade evaluated separate statements describing three different children, each of whom was said to have a different estimate of the likelihood that a scary event depicted in a movie would actually occur. Subjects rated how scared each of the three children felt. The results of the two studies revealed that preschoolers showed very little comprehension of the meaning of any of the three words, but by fourth grade the majority of children distinguished among all three terms. Children understood the distinction between definitely and both of the other terms (possibly, probably) better than they understood the distinction between possibly and probably. This finding is consistent with research on the development of children's understanding of probability concepts. Unexpectedly, the distinction between probably and definitely seems to emerge at a younger age than the distinction between possibly and definitely. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for communicating verbal messages to children.