The achievement of labelling was investigated in a longitudinal study of one mother–infant dyad, using video-recordings of their free play in a period between 0; 8 and 1; 6. Analysis of joint picture-book reading revealed that this activity had very early on the structure of a dialogue. The child's lexical labels might be regarded as more adult-like substitutes for earlier communicative forms that he had utilized in the dialogue. These were smiling, reaching, pointing and babbling vocalizations, all of which were consistently interpreted by the mother as expressing the child's intention of requesting a label or providing one. Participating in a ritualized dialogue, rather than imitation, was found to be the major mechanism through which labelling was achieved.

This study investigated serial effects in recurrent ostensive definitions of words in the context of joint picture-book reading by 20 mother-infant dyads. Content analysis revealed a number of labeling formats, among them simple labeling by the mother or by the infant, elicitation of labeling by "what-questions," elicitation of pointing by "where-questions," and elicited and spontaneous imitation by the infant. The dyads applied a mixture of labeling formats to the same referent on its successive occurrences. Imitation was more likely following previous error in labeling than were correct labeling and pointing by the infant. No difference was found in the correct labeling rate following production, comprehension, and imitation. Mothers tended to follow errors and no responses with simple labeling of the same referent on its next appearance, whereas they followed correct responses with attempts to elicit labeling or pointing from the infant. The results imply that imitation, comprehension, and productive responses to words by vocabulary-learning infants do not represent different levels of word knowledge, and also that the respective vocabularies are overlapping at a given point in time.

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The first verbs to participate in VO and SVO combinations, and the temporal parameters of the spread of these combinatory patterns over different verbs were investigated. The longitudinal language observations of 16 children, one acquiring English, the others Hebrew, were examined. The children were observed once a week for 3–12 months, the observations starting when the children were still in the single-word stage (1;1–2;1) and ending when they were well into multiword speech (1;8–2;7). The results indicate that the more verbs children already know to combine in a certain pattern, the faster they learn new ones. Apparently children induce from individual word-combinations some general principles that facilitate further learning. The ‘pathbreaking verbs’ that begin the acquisition of a novel syntactic rule tend to be generic verbs expressing the relevant combinatorial property in a relatively pure fashion: the same verbs that children first combine with direct objects, are typical grammaticalized markers of transitivity in many languages. These verbs do not have HIGH TRANSITIVITY as defined by Hopper & Thompson (1980). Rather, they express fundamental ‘object relations’ of incorporation into, and ejection from the personal. Crosslinguistic evidence indicates that this may be the basic transitivity construct in languages. The results raise the possibility that lexical-specific learning of positional patterns is sufficient to account for the formation of syntactic abstractions.

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