We tested 24 caregivers of preschool children to determine whether their strategies for teaching novel adjectives are consistent with children's demonstrated abilities to learn these words (e.g. Waxman & Klibanoff, 2000). On each of four trials, caregivers had to select one of two cards, both of which showed a familiar object bearing an unfamiliar property. On the within-basic card, the object was accompanied by a second object from the same basic-level category; on the across-basic card, this second object came from a different basic-level category. Caregivers' task was to choose the card that would be more helpful to teach a novel adjective for the unfamiliar property. If the second object differed from the first in terms of a novel target property, caregivers (N = 12) stated a strong preference for the within-basic card. If the two objects agreed in terms of the novel property, caregivers (N = 12) indicated a clear preference for the across-basic card. The findings offer new insight into the speed and efficiency of lexical development, by revealing that word teachers, like word learners (cf. Waxman & Klibanoff, 2000), are sensitive to the conditions under which certain contrasts (in property or in basic-level category) are effective in promoting the successful acquisition of novel adjectives.

Interpretation of relative clauses sentences was investigated by having sixteen children between the ages of 3;5 and 4;6 act out sentences within four conditions that varied the number of potential referents for each noun within the sentence. No difference in interpretation accuracy was found between felicitous and infelicitous conditions or between biased and neutral conditions. This result raises problems for the view that children of this age know the pragmatic principles for interpreting relative clauses.

This is a position paper modelling the domain of linguistic literacy and its development through the life span. It aims to provide a framework for the analysis of language development in the school years, integrating sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic notions of variation, language awareness, and literacy in a comprehensive model. The paper focuses on those aspects of literacy competence that are expressed in language as well as aspects of linguistic knowledge that are affected by literacy competence, tracing the route that children take in appropriating linguistic literacy as part of their cognitive abilities and examining the effect of literacy on language across development. Our view of linguistic literacy consists of one defining feature: control over linguistic variation from both a user-dependent (‘lectal’) and a context-dependent (modality, genre, and register) perspective; of one concomitant process: metalanguage and its role in language development; and of one condition: familiarity with writing and written language from two aspects: written language as discourse style – the recognition that the kind of language used for writing is essentially different from the one used for speech; and written language as a notational system – the perception and growing command of the representational system that is used in the written modality. Linguistic literacy is viewed as a constituent of language knowledge characterized by the availability of multiple linguistic resources and by the ability to consciously access one's own linguistic knowledge and to view language from various perspectives.

In their position paper, Dorit Ravid & Liliana Tolchinsky have made a critical attempt to develop a theoretical framework which would account for the success of learning to read and write in different languages throughout the life span. The major focus of this framework is on the linguistic perspective of literacy development – leading to the concept of linguistic literacy. The authors highlight those aspects of literacy competence that are expressed in language as well as aspects of linguistic knowledge that are affected by literacy competence. They postulate control as a defining feature, metalanguage as a concomitant process, and familiarity with writing and written language as a condition of linguistic literacy. These postulations can be seen as highly relevant from both a theoretical and a practical point of view since such framework is useful in order to develop research initiatives and educational programs on literacy development. The view of literacy as a constituent of language knowledge characterized by the availability of multiple linguistic resources can be seen as powerful. However, given the multifaceted character of written language and its development, the question is to what extent the concept of linguistic literacy should be relativized. In the present commentary the impact of sociocultural and cognitive constraints on literacy will be stressed to disambiguate the monolithic conception of linguistic literacy.

This study examined developmental change in the word association task as reading acquisition occurred. Syntagmatic responses follow the stimulus word in discourse, ‘cold’ – ‘outside’, while paradigmatic associates are of the same form class, ‘cold’ – ‘hot’. Some 59 children were tested three times during the school year. The average age of the younger group was 5;4, and the older group, 6;2 at the October test. They were given the PPVT, the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test, and a word association task. The younger group gave an increasing number of rhyming responses and the older group gave more paradigmatic responses as the year progressed. Regression analyses with the older group attributed this to reading acquisition. The changing nature of the cognitive representation of words as reading acquisition took place was discussed.

Twenty Japanese-speaking twenty-six- to twenty-seven-year-old women were recorded as they conversed with an infant, an elder, or another young adult. When their utterances were acoustically compared among the three settings with regard to prosodic characteristics, elevated pitch and increased pitch range were found when their speech was directed to both the infant and the elder as compared to when it was directed to the young adult. The degree to which such modifications occurred was greater in those women who were experienced with children than in those women who were not experienced. Moreover, the degree of the modification showed a highly positive correlation in each participant when the speech was directed to the infant and when it was directed to the elder. Prosodic modifications of speech styles to infants and to elders are both exaggerated consistently through the experience with children.

Ravid & Tolchinsky are to be applauded for proposing literacy as a central topic in first language acquisition. A synthesis of research in spoken language, in literacy and literacy practices and the lines of enquiry represented in MacWhinney (1999) has interesting consequences for theories of first language acquisition, not least the nativist ones. This response focuses on constructions but a brief list of controversial points in R&T's paper will be useful.

Among the various processes that characterize the development of literacy competence presented by Ravid & Tolchinsky in their paper, two are particularly relevant for studies of language development focusing on crosslinguistic sentence processing: (1) the continuity vs. discontinuity between the differential access to oral and written codes within the same language and between languages; (2) the representational status of the conscious access to language provided by the development of literacy, which renders variability more accessible and controllable. In this short note, I shall deal only with the first of these.

As Ravid & Tolchinsky (2002) have indicated in their article, literacy has profound effects upon the development of language in school-age children, adolescents, and adults. Once children are able to read proficiently – typically by eight or nine years – their ability to acquire increasingly sophisticated aspects of language can expand greatly. The convergence of language and literacy is readily apparent upon examining the lexicon, a language domain that is subject to unlimited growth through the lifespan. For this reason, I would like to elaborate on the role of literacy in relation to lexical development beyond the preschool years, focusing on processes that facilitate the learning of word meanings. In this commentary, it will be shown that there is an ongoing reciprocal relationship between lexical development and literacy in which unfamiliar words are first encountered in print and learned through various metalinguistic strategies. Subsequently, this increased knowledge of words leads to improved comprehension of text, which in turn, leads to further expansion of the lexicon (Sternberg & Powell, 1983).

Ravid & Tolchinksy (R&T) introduce an important concept for the field of language acquisition and development: linguistic literacy. To be ‘linguistically literate’, they say, one must possess both ‘knowledge of the two major linguistic modalities – speech and writing’ and ‘a linguistic repertoire that encompasses a wide range of registers and genres’. These two statements make clear the great breadth of research that the authors have considered in formulating their model.

In their conceptual framework for linguistic literacy development, Ravid & Tolchinsky synthesize research studies from several perspectives. One of these is corpus-based research, which has been used for several large-scale research studies of spoken and written registers over the past 20 years. In this approach, a large, principled collection of natural texts (a ‘corpus’) is analysed using computational and interactive techniques, to identify the salient linguistic characteristics of each register or text variety. Three characteristics of corpus-based analysis are particularly important (see Biber, Conrad & Reppen 1998):

1. [bull ] a special concern for the representativeness of the text sample being analysed, and for the generalizability of findings;

2. [bull ] overt recognition of the interactions among linguistic features: the ways in which features co-occur and alternate;

3. [bull ] a focus on register as the most important parameter of linguistic variation: strong patterns of use in one register often represent only weak patterns in other registers.

The authors of this rich and interesting paper have done a fine service to the field of child language by bringing to the forefront the largely neglected topic of later language development. Major discourse-oriented studies including children beyond preschool age have been confined to oral production of narrative texts (Peterson & McCabe, 1983; Berman & Slobin, 1994; Hickmann, in press), and they all leave off at around age ten. The pathbreaking work of Labov (1972) did in fact consider the language of pre-adolescents and teenagers in explicitly linguistic terms, but this also concerned oral narratives without focusing on development. One important contribution of the present study, then, is to show that the progression from early school-age via middle childhood and on to adolescence and adulthood involves far more than merely increased vocabulary.

Ravid & Tolchinsky present a valuable framework for understanding the development of metalinguistic knowledge (i.e. grasp of language form as opposed to content). Although this framework makes an admirable contribution, we question the authors' emphasis on familiarity with written language as an enabling condition, and instead outline an approach that makes more obvious provision for cognitive foundations and early development. This approach attempts to locate the development of metalinguistic understanding within the context of domain-general and age-related changes in cognitive function – in particular, increases in the complexity of representational structures involved in conscious reflection.

Ravid & Tolchinsky's paper draws a comprehensive picture of the fact that literacy is a lengthy developing process involving many linguistic factors which sometimes begins even before school age and lasts until adulthood. I very much appreciated the breadth and thoroughness of Ravid & Tolchinsky's paper and, in particular, the fact that they have taken the relationship between oral language and literacy into account. It seems to me that this is rarely the case in current linguistic theories and I would like to offer a few comments on some of the consequences that a serious approach to literacy development would have on the studies of both oral language and literacy, and on linguistic theories themselves as well.

Commenting on R&T's ‘Developing Linguistic Literacy’ is not an easy task. Their attempt addresses precisely the right questions, in all their complexities and breadth, centring and bundling these questions in strategic and potentially novel ways, and thereby exploring new territories and encouraging investigators to enter these territories. However, I still feel left with a sense of incompleteness and exclusion when it comes to a more discursive orientation to theorizing literacy and development.

The model under discussion was elaborated in response to our need to construct a general, explicit and integrative framework for the seemingly different strands of research that we and our associates have carried out in the last decade or so. The findings of these studies made it increasingly clear to us that it is impossible to account for the dramatic changes in language knowledge and language use in children and adolescents within the boundaries of current research paradigms in language acquisition. Our goal was thus to relate later language acquisition and children's increasing cognitive abilities to literacy development in a motivated way, focusing on germane themes in socio-linguistics and discourse analysis, on the one hand, and facets of written language, on the other.