▪ Abstract  According to recent interpretive approaches to the study of children's socialization, meaning creation is an active process by which children playfully transform and actively resist cultural categories, and where language is viewed as social action that helps shape reality ( Gaskins et al. 1992 ). Four ways in which children's peer talk establishes and maintains peer culture are considered: (a) how children elaborate games and codes (and ritualize the basis of inclusion in the peer group) through peer talk, (b) how conflict talk functions to elaborate peer culture, (c) how identities as peer group phenomena are talked into being through peer talk, and (d) how adult culture is resisted through peer talk. Agentive goals of children's peer culture, and the role of language in achieving them, are discussed in each section. I conclude that sociolinguistics gives researchers a way to think about social competence as sets of linguistic practices (e.g., positionings, voicings, participation framework manipulations) that children enact.

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and NELSON, KATHEWNE. Taxonomic Knowledge: What Kind and When? CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1992, 63, 978-998. Taxonomic knowledge may be distinguished into several forms: horizontal, representing links between items at the same level of a taxonomic hierarchy (e.g., dog-cow), and vertical, representing links between items at different hierarchical levels (e.g., dog-animal). Horizontal relations include 3 category types: slot-filler (based on constrained function, i.e., shared function within an event), conventional subcategory (based on constrained, but not event-based, function and/or on arbitrary cultural groupings), and conventional superordinate (based on unconstrained function). 3 experiments-category production, word association, and forced-picture-choice-explored teixonomic and thematic/ schematic knowledge in 4-and 7-year-old children and adults. Results showed preschooler taxonomic knowledge to be restricted to slot-filler categories. Conventional horizontal relations and vertical taxonomic knowledge emerged with age. Slot-HUers played a role in these developments Ol taxonomic knowledge. Also developing was task/context sensitive responding, with 7-, but not 4-year-olds, relying on distinct forms of knowledge across tasks.