First Language

The goal of this study was to use evidence from production data to identify three dimensions along which Japanese children may dis criminate transitive from intransitive verbs. The three dimensions are: (1) case marking, (2) locus of change animacy, as indicated by theme animacy, and (3) planning, as indicated by the appropriate use of verb suffixes denoting request, desire, and prohibition. Production data from two Japanese boys were used in cluster analyses that modelled the role of semantic and formal factors in the organization of the children's verb lexicons. The results confirmed that the semantic dimensions of theme animacy and the planning of an action were sufficient to classify children's verbs into transitive and intransitive groups. It is concluded that at a time when these Japanese children did not use case marking for classification, the children had verb lexicons that were already dif ferentiated into transitive and intransitive classes.

This study examines two theories concerning the nature of parents' talk to their young children. The Differential Experience Hypothesis posits that mothers' and fathers' speech styles are distinguishable and each serves a different function in the child's language development. In contrast the Context Hypothesis argues that observed differences between parents are the product of the different contexts in which parent-toddler interaction is examined. An analysis of mothers' and fathers' talk to their 10- and 15-month-olds during three activities- book play, toy play and free play - revealed that both the structure and function of parental language were influenced most by the nature of play in which parent-child pairs were engaged. Variation between mothers and fathers may, therefore, reflect a predisposition for parents to engage in different activities when their language is recorded for examination. Moreover, it is argued that these differ ences reflect their idiosyncratic perceptions of socially expected behaviour.

This research was conducted to determine how temporal adverbs become integrated into evolving temporal systems. During the period from 2;4 to 3;2, the utterances of three Polish children which contained temporal adverbs were classified as specifying reference time prior to, simultaneous with, or subsequent to speech time. This relationship between reference time and speech time was found either to contradict or to correspond to the relationship established between event time and speech time. The following three sets of adverbs emerged: immediate, e.g., 'already', cyclic, e.g., 'tomorrow', and remote, e.g., 'long ago'. The order of emergence was first immediate, then cyclic, and then remote. Contradictions were restricted to the cyclic set. Hence it was argued that contradictions do not represent a disruption in the systematic development of temporal systems.