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The phonological acquisition of 129 monolingual Putonghua-speaking children, aged 1; 6 to 4; 6, is described. Putonghua (Modern Standard Chinese) syllables have four possible elements: tone, syllable-initial consonant, vowel, and syllable-final consonant. The children's errors suggested that Putonghua-speaking children mastered these elements in the following order: tones were acquired first; then syllable-final consonants and vowels; and syllable-initial consonants were acquired last. Phonetic acquisition of the 21 syllable-initial consonants was complete by 3; 6 for 75% of children. By 4; 6 the children were using the syllable-initial consonants correctly on two thirds of occasions (with the exception of four affricates). Simple vowels emerged early in development. However, triphthongs and diphthongs were prone to systematic errors. Tone errors were rare, perhaps because of their role in distinguishing lexical meaning. In contrast, acquisition of ‘weak stress’ and ‘rhotacized feature’ was incomplete in the oldest children assessed. Phonological processes used by the children were identified. Two of these processes, syllable-initial consonant deletion and backing, would be considered atypical error patterns in English. Existing theories of phonological acquisition (e.g. concepts of markedness, functional load, feature hierarchies) cannot account for some of the patterns revealed. A satisfactory explanation of the findings requires more attention to the specific characteristics of the linguistic system the children are learning. It is proposed that the saliency of the components in the language system determines the order of acquisition.

Cultural, linguistic, and developmental evidence was taken into consideration in constructing the HCDI, a Hebrew adaptation of the MCDI. The HCDI was then administered to a stratified sample of Israeli mothers of 253 toddlers aged 1; 6 to 2; 0 (M = 1; 8·18). Hebrew results are presented and compared with scores from the original MCDI sample (Fenson, Dale, Reznick, Bates, Thal & Pethick, 1994). The HCDI is a reliable and sensitive measure of lexical development and emergent grammar, capturing wide variability among Israeli toddlers. In comparison with English, the relation between vocabulary size and age, as well as the shape of the growth curves for nouns, predicate terms, and closed class words relative to size of lexicon, were strikingly similar. These results indicate that conclusions concerning cross-linguistic similarities can be best documented by using parallel methods of measurement. The HCDI results support the claim that early lexical development in Hebrew and in English follow remarkably similar development patterns, despite the typological differences between the two target languages.

This study investigates structural and pragmatic aspects of caregiver input in English and Korean that relate to the early development of nouns and verbs. Twenty mothers in each language were asked to interact with their one-and-a-half-year-old children in two contexts: book-reading and toy-play. Overall, English-speaking mothers use more nouns than verbs, and focus more on objects than on actions. In contrast, Korean-speaking mothers provide a balanced treatment of nouns and verbs, and focus on objects and actions to a similar degree. A significant context effect indicates that whereas English-speaking mothers emphasize nouns in both contexts, Korean-speaking mothers do so only in the Books context. In the Toys context, they provide more verbs and focus more on actions. These data suggest that systematic comparisons of caregiver input within and across different contexts provide a richer and more accurate account of the variability that can occur across languages and cultures.

This paper presents an experiment that examined two related questions. First, it examined the effects of animacy on the production of different syntactic structures and word orders by Catalan-speaking children. Secondly, it explored the relationship between age and the production of different syntactic structures by these children. The results of a picture description experiment run with eighty Catalan-speaking children aged 4; 11 to 11; 11 show that participants tended to produce more object- dislocated descriptions when the patient was animate than when the patient was inanimate. The results also show that while the dislocation of object clauses is a construction already consolidated at 5; 0, the passive structure is a construction still not fully acquired at 11; 0. A comparison between the results obtained in the present experiment with existing results from similar experiments with English-speaking children shows that there is a cross-language difference in the age at which children start producing passive clauses. We argue that frequency of exposure to a particular syntactic structure is an important factor that contributes to the acquisition of that syntactic structure. We also suggest that the effects of animacy on the production of object-dislocated descriptions can be explained by means of conceptual and lexical accessibility.

The development of specified tense and number morphology in child Catalan and Spanish is found to correlate with the onset of overt subject use. The data come from four monolingual child Catalan-speakers (from the Serrà & Solé corpus) and one monolingual child Spanish-speaker (from the Linaza corpus) who were studied longitudinally from 1:0 to 3; 6, approximately. The simultaneous emergence of tense and number morphology on one hand and overt subjects on the other in the children's speech is taken as evidence that a particular aspect of Universal Grammar, Case Theory, determines the possible co-occurrences of verbal inflections and subject types in developing grammatical systems. Parallels in verbal inflectional development are found in other child languages, while such parallels are not found in regard to subject use. Possible modifications to Case Theory, which would allow a unified account of the cross-linguistic developmental patterns of subject use, are considered. The possibility of explaining the early absence of overt subjects in these null subject languages as the result of an early sentence processing deficit is explored and rejected. The children's knowledge of whether their language is a null subject or overt subject language even before acquiring adult-like verbal inflection is taken as further evidence for what has been called ‘early convergence’ on parameter settings.

The present paper reports an analysis of correct wh-question production and subject–auxiliary inversion errors in one child's early wh-question data (age 2; 3.4 to 4; 10.23). It is argued that two current movement rule accounts (DeVilliers, 1991; Valian, Lasser & Mandelbaum, 1992) cannot explain the patterning of early wh-questions. However, the data can be explained in terms of the child's knowledge of particular lexically-specific wh-word+auxiliary combinations, and the pattern of inversion and uninversion predicted from the relative frequencies of these combinations in the mother's speech. The results support the claim that correctly inverted wh-questions can be produced without access to a subject–auxiliary inversion rule and are consistent with the constructivist claim that a distributional learning mechanism that learns and reproduces lexically-specific formulae heard in the input can explain much of the early multi-word speech data. The implications of these results for movement rule-based and constructivist theories of grammatical development are discussed.

Marcus, Pinker, Ullman, Hollander, Rosen & Xu (1992) claim that when the irregular past form of a verb is known, it is immediately known to be the correct form, such that overregularizations only occur as speech errors, not as a genuine grammatical alternative; as a result, they argue, overregularization rates are, when carefully inspected, very low. In the present paper: (1) it is shown that even if overregularizations are a genuine grammatical alternative, overall rates in samples would still be low for most children; (2) careful analysis shows evidence for substantial overregularization periods in three longitudinal subjects ages 2; 5–5; 2 (Abe), 2; 3–5; 2 (Adam) and 2; 3–5; 0 (Sarah); (3) Abe's much higher rates follow from general developments in his past tense acquisition, in ways not consonant with Marcus et al.'s formulations.