Child Language

Part I The beginnings of language - from vocalization to first words: on developmental changes in the symbolic process; transitional phenomena in early language acquisition; the development of conversation between mothers and babies; the achievement and antecedents of labelling; acquisition of words by first language learners; from people, to plans, to objects - changes in the meaning of early words and their relation to cognitive development. Part II Form and meaning in early language; development of a first language in the human species; complex sentences - acquisition of syntactic connectives and the semantic relations they encode; the child's expression of meaning - expanding relationships among lexicon, syntax and morphology; lexical innovations - how children learn to create new words; factors influencing children's hypothetical reference; children's sensitivity to constraints on word meaning - taxonomic vs. thematic relations; biological dispositions to learn language. Part III Social and private speech: on inner speech; relevant models of language; social speech and social interaction - egocentrism revisited; social and private speech at two years; young children's use of age-appropriate speech styles in social interaction and role playing; young speaker's evaluations of their listeners' comprehension in a referential communication task. Part IV Discourse - conversation and narrative; "Oh them sherriff" - a pragmatic analysis of children's responses to questions; conversation, cohesive and thematic patterning in children's dialogue; at morning it's lunchtime - a scriptal view of children's dialogues; a code in the node - the use of a story schema in retrieval; the development of children's storytelling skill. Part V Metaphor and metalinguistic processes: the development of metaphoric understanding; observing spontaneous metaphor in children; sources of difficulty in the young child's understanding of metaphorical language; learning to tell jokes - a study of metalinguistic abilities; word magic revisited - monolingual and bilingual children's understanding of the word-object relationship; learning to make definitions.