This study involves the analysis of a kind of data not often found in the literature: spontaneous story-telling without an audience and therefore free of any direct influence from another person. The stories are told by a bilingual four-year-old, with examples from both English and French. In comparing the data from both languages, it was found that the French narratives contained a much larger percentage of modifiers (adjectives, adverbs and relative clauses) and employed a greater variety of tenses, which were manipulated to highlight various parts of the story. Comparison with data from children's books in the two languages largely supports the interlinguistic differences in the oral data.

This study focuses on the development of epistemic modality, with particular attention to how French children evaluate the conditions of use for modal expressions marking certainty and uncertainty. Sixty children aged four, six and eight were shown films involving verbal interactions in which a target speaker accused another of having performed a deed. The analysis examine children's responses during a subsequent interview in which they were asked to attribute an epistemic attitude of certainty/uncertainty to the target speaker as a function of three factors: (a) whether he had witnessed the deed; (b) whether his accusation was modalized by the verb croire (‘think/believe’); and (c) whether the accusation was true or false. The results show that the four-and six-year-olds attribute certainty more often than the eight-year-olds. This dissymmetry is accompanied by a developmental progression in children's conceptions of these modal categories, which change from a ‘realistic’ conception (mainly based on truth/falsity) at four years to an increasingly metalinguistic and relativized conception thereafter.

This study had two purposes. The first was to examine age differences in the extent to which children infer and use a speaker's interpersonal goal to understand speech acts. To this end, the subjects responded to Do you have…? requests in a role-playing task. The goal behind such a request is implicit in the speaker's choice of noun phrase. We sought to determine whether children, like adults, use the noun phrase to infer the speaker's goal and thereby decide whether the request is a yes-no question or a directive. The second purpose was to examine age differences in the extent to which children select responses that carry implications appropriate to the speaker's interpersonal goal. To do this, Do you have… ? requests containing general category labels were addressed to the children when they possessed all the category exemplars and when they possessed only a few exemplars. A simple yes implies that the listener has nearly all exemplars and, therefore, is inappropriate for the speaker's goal in the latter situation. The subjects were six-, seven-, nine-, and eleven-year-olds and adults, with 12 subjects per age. Only the eleven-year-olds and the adults used the speaker's noun phrase and considered the implications of yes.

Although preschoolers typically accept the basic level label for an object (e.g. dog) and tend to resist all others (e.g. collie, animal), this tendency is not inviolable. Under certain circumstances, children accept more than one label per object. In this experiment, with 20 three- and 20 four-year-old children, we extended this body of research in three ways. We examined (1) children's production of multiple, hierarchically related labels; (2) the pragmatic consequences of the inherent asymmetry of inclusion relations; and (3) the influence of morphology (modifier + noun constructions vs. simple lexemes) at the subordinate level. Children labelled objects most frequently at the basic level, but also readily produced many non-basic level terms. Children, like adults, may prefer to label objects at the basic level, but they exhibit no general prohibition against also labelling at other, non-basic levels. Their performance challenges the notion that the ability to label objects flexibly at multiple levels is beyond the young child's capacity.

This study examined five- to seven-year-olds' assumptions about the experiential connotation of ‘I know that's X’. In Experiment 1 children tried to identify which of a set of unfamiliar targets had a given name (X), and after they had chosen, we enquired either whether they KNEW their chosen item was (X) or whether they were SURE. Six- to seven-year-olds (N = 39) judged that they were sure more often than they judged that they knew, which suggests that although they experienced confidence that they had chosen correctly, they assumed it would be inappropriate to judge ‘know’, because this would imply an experiential basis, which was absent. Five- to six-year-olds (N = 36) did not discriminate between the two kinds of question. In Experiment 2, children could infer which item was a named unfamiliar cartoon character by ruling out familiar distractors. Six- to seven-year-olds (N = 35) judged that they knew they had picked the right one much more often than they judged that they knew their chosen picture was (target name). Again, five- to six-year-olds (N = 44) did not discriminate between the two kinds of question. This demonstrates powerfully that the older children held an experiential connotation of ‘I know that's X’, since they avoided such judgements even when they knew by inference they had chosen correctly.

Several studies have argued that children under the ages of nine or ten years rarely comprehend figurative language and therefore interpret it literally. Cacciari & Levorato (1989). showed that when idioms are presented within a rich informational environment, children are able to grasp the figurative sense at the age of seven, and also that children are less able to produce idioms than to comprehend them. In three experiments involving 264 children (whose age ranged from 6;9 to 11;9), we contrasted this global elaboration hypothesis with a partially alternative one, the acquisition via exposure hypothesis, according to which the frequency of exposure of children to idioms is the main factor explaining their acquisition and production. Results showed that familiarity (i.e. frequency of exposure) plays a minor role and only for children who are not yet able to use contextual information. Familiarity per se does not adequately explain how children acquire a figurative competence. A tentative model is proposed in order to account for figurative competence acquisition.

Pizzuto & Caselli (1992) claim that data from the morphosyntactic development of Italian-speaking children are inconsistent with nativist, parameter-setting models of language development. In the present Note it is argued that much of the data which Pizzuto & Caselli adduce is irrelevant to the specific hypotheses they are evaluating and that those data which are relevant fully support parameter-setting and linguistictheoretic models, contrary to their claims.

The HCRC dialogue database consists of over 700 transcribed and coded dialogues from pairs of speakers aged from seven to fourteen. The speakers are recorded while tackling co-operative problem-solving tasks and the same pairs of speakers are recorded over two years tackling 10 different versions of our two tasks. In addition there are over 200 dialogues recorded between pairs of undergraduate speakers engaged on versions of the same tasks. Access to the database, and to its accompanying custom-built search software, is available electronically over the JANET system by contacting liz@psy.glasgow.ac.uk, from whom further information about the database and a user's guide to the database can be obtained.

Explicit verbal comparisons in 53 popular children's books were syntactically and semantically classified. Comparison types found in these books were contrasted with comparisons used as comprehension stimuli in extant developmental research. Although noun-phrase metaphor has been a popular syntactic form in research, it is a rare form in children's literature. Implications for the design of future stimulus sets are discussed.

With the increasing use of computers in language research, there is a need for caution concerning several new issues of data accountability. This paper presents four principles for archive-based language research: Maximum Readability and Minimum Bias; Consistent Encoding for exhaustive computer search; Systematic Contrastiveness; and Data Comparability in elicitation, transcription and coding. These and related principles are illustrated by examples from existing computer archives, and strategies are suggested for minimizing detrimental effects of violations. Finally, the paper describes some implications of the principles for properties of a field-wide and international standard of transcription of language data.

Edwards (1992) presents a set of examples from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) as prototypes of bad transcription practice. Her discussion is based upon four basic confusions. First, Edwards confuses old and discarded versions of CHAT with current CHAT. Second, she confuses the relation between CHAT standards with the implementation of these standards during the process of reformatting older corpora. Third, she confuses transcription for automatic analysis with transcription for documentation. Fourth, she confuses the CHAT guidelines with the larger CHILDES system. We argue that these confusions have misled Edwards into developing an overly rigid set of principles for data analysis which, if followed literally, could choke off progress in the analysis of spontaneous language samples.

This study of parents with their children demonstrates irregular and unpredictable grammatical features in their child-directed speech. The parents were observed quarterly in parent-child interaction with their oldest child beginning when she was two-years old, and with their younger twin daughters beginning when they reached two years. Language samples were transcribed and analyzed using CHILDES. The parents used grammatical speech with adults. A high proportion (8% to 32% per session) of their utterances to the children contained non-dialectal errors, primarily omissions of closed-class items. A typical example was ‘she a puppet’. The evidence suggests these parents were trying to teach their children language. Their implicit theories of language and learning led to a highy unusual variant of parentese.