The acquisition of connective forms and the meaning relations between connected clauses in the development of complex sentences is described for four children from two to three years of age. The major results of the study include the developmental interactions between syntactic connectives and meaning relations, and between these interactions and the discourse environments in which they occurred. The first syntactic connective the children learned, and, was the most general: semantically, and was used to encode conjunction with all of the different conjunction meaning relations in the order Additive < Temporal < Causal < Adversative. Other connectives were semantically more specific, and were learned subsequently with different syntactic structures in the order Conjunction < Complementation < Relativization. These results are discussed in terms of FORM, relative linguistic complexity; CONTENT, the intersection of form with conceptual and semantic factors affecting acquisition; and USE, discourse cohesion.

To examine possible explanations of the reported inaccuracies of children with specific language impairment (SLI) on nonword repetition, we compared the repetitions of 54 children with SLI and their peers in terms of number and type of error as well as latency and duration of response. We found no evidence of differences between the groups in auditory discrimination or response processes, but we did find some evidence suggesting differences in either the formation or storage of phonological representations in working memory. Because repetition accuracy was significantly correlated with expressive, but not receptive, measures of language, we hypothesized that the problem lay with the nature of phonological representations in working memory and not with the ability to hold phonological information in working memory.

This paper explores why children with SLI are less accurate than peers in naming pictures. Subjects included 66 children with SLI (aged 4:3 to 9:7) with 2 subgroups, one with expressive-only language deficits (SLIexp) and one with receptive and expressive language deficits (SLImix), and 66 children with no language impairment (NLI). Children with SLI made more errors than children with NLI, and proportionally more of their errors were names of objects associated with the pictured object (e.g., shoe/foot) and names that were phonologically related to the target than were those with NLI. The relative frequency of error types was related to pattern of language deficit; in comparison to their NLI peers, a greater proportion of SLIexp errors were phonological errors, and a greater proportion of the SLImix errors were semantic associated, semantic perceptual, and nonsemantic perseverative. The proportion of semantic-associated errors also discriminated a subgroup of the children with SLI from a matched subgroup of the children with SLImix. Interpretations and potential implications are discussed.

The acquisition of to in infinitive complement structure was examined in the spontaneous speech data from four children, who were observed longitudinally from two to three years of age. The children learned to as a complementizer connective in the context of a small group of verbs and other matrix forms that take a verb phrase complement. They did not learn to in the context of the complement verbs to mark the infinitive. Secondly, the children learned to with the meaning ‘direction towards’ and not as a meaningless syntactic marker. These results contribute to understanding the relation between the acquisition of complex syntax and the verb system in child language, and to evaluating traditional and contemporary linguistic theories of infinitive complement structure in English.

To examine the role of different cognitive processes in accounting for the slower naming times of children with specific language impairment (SLI) relative to peers with no language impairment (NLI), three tasks designed to stress different types of processing were administered: naming pictures with the signal to respond presented at various delay intervals, naming following different durations of exposure to identical and unrelated primes, and vocally responding to nonlinguistic stimuli. Children with SLI, aged 4 to 9.5 years, were significantly slower than their NLI age peers on naming and on responding to nonlinguistic stimuli, but the effect of delay interval before naming and of duration of prime exposure before naming was similar for both groups. Results suggested that speed of naming is related to the slower nonlinguistic response processing of children with SLI and not to speed of their linguistic or perceptual processing. To examine differences in processing that might relate to pattern of language performance we examined responses of two subgroups of SLI. The subgroup of children whose language problems involved expressive but not receptive skills was not significantly slower than their NLI peers. The children whose problems involved both expressive and receptive language were significantly slower, but this was influenced by age. Findings are discussed in terms of language performance, age, task variables, and a generalized rate-limiting factor.