Parent-child conversations are a potential source of children's developing understanding of the biological domain. We investigated patterns in parent-child conversations that may inform children about biological domain boundaries. At a marine science center exhibit, we compared parent-child talk about typical sea animals with faces (fish) with…

Grammatical gender is generally considered an early and error-free acquisition in French children. This article first examines how children cope with the gender attribution problem, "i.e.", how they determine the gender of individual nouns. We consider the plausibility and requirements of an account in which tacit phonological assignment rules are…

Upon witnessing a causal event, do children's gestures encode causal knowledge that (a) does not appear in their linguistic descriptions or (b) conveys the same information as their sentential expressions? The former use of gesture is considered supplementary; the latter is considered reinforcing. Sixty-four English-speaking children aged 2.5-5…

Act-out and intermodal preferential looking (IPL) tasks were administered to 67 English children aged 2-0, 2-9 and 3-5 to assess their comprehension of canonical SVO transitive word order with both familiar and novel verbs. Children at 3-5 and at 2-9 showed evidence of comprehending word order in both verb conditions and both tasks, although…

Adolescents (N = 46; M = 12.46 years) who had previously participated in a longitudinal study of autobiographical memory development narrated their early childhood memories, interpreted life events, and completed a family history questionnaire and language assessment. Three distinct components of adolescent memory emerged: (1) age of earliest…

In many cognitive domains, learning is more effective when exemplars are distributed over a number of sessions than when they are all presented within one session. The present study investigated this "distributed learning effect" with respect to English-speaking children's acquisition of a complex grammatical construction. Forty-eight children…

Akhtar [Akhtar, N. (1999). Acquiring basic word order: Evidence for data-driven learning of syntactic structure. Journal of Child Language, 26, 339-356] taught children novel verbs in ungrammatical word orders. Her results suggested that the acquisition of canonical word order is a gradual, data-driven process. The current study adapted this…

This paper advances the hypothesis that young children use narrative play and stories to construct two types of fiction, the worlds of "what is" and "what if." Heinz Werner's conceptualization of children's spheres of reality, in which actions, symbols, and events are constructed in particular ways, is used as a theoretical framework for…

Examines children's variation in rate, style, and sequence of grammatical development, within and across natural languages. Using a sample of English and Italian infants, concludes that while there are structural differences between English and Italian that could affect the order in which nouns and verbs are acquired, no differences were observed…

Reviews "The Transition from Infancy to Language: Acquiring the Power of Expression" (L. Bloom). Underscores that Bloom's account of word learning represents an ethnographic, theoretic, and research approach that explores development by starting with the child, and looks at the many behaviors of the child and views these in relation to one…

Compared the use of conditional logic in adult-adult and adult-child conversation. Results indicated that conversation patterns and inferences were similar except that children made fewer independent inferences and shifts in taxonomic level and responded more frequently to socially controlling statements than did adults. (AA)

Examined the effects of mothers' conversations with their children on children's emergent literacy. Found a clear and fairly strong relationship between maternal conversation and children's literacy, especially for children's print concepts, vocabulary, and story comprehension skills. Children's early conversational participation showed a stronger…

The causal structure of schemas for the actions and states by different classes of English verbs was examined in the elicited narratives of 19 preschool children. Results showed that verbs within a class elicited similar narratives, whereas across classes the event descriptions varied in the animacy of the event participants and the causal…

Children ages five, seven, and nine years named objects with multiple names in a neutral context and in a biased context. Children selected names in accord with nonlinguistic constraints, but at the cost of longer naming times. Both name selection success and associated cost were more evident in older children than in younger children. (TJQ)

This study of 2.5 and 3.5 year olds indicated that children of this age do not know many names for solid substances but can be taught names for them; that children represent the names as mass nouns and possibly adjectives; and that there is development of children's nonlinguistic knowledge of substances between the ages of 2.5 and 3 years. (TJQ)