A study suggesting semantic rather than syntactic early language acquisition by children. (CH)

The relation between sensorimotor attainments and linguistic development in children using referential speech at the single- and two-word utterance levels was examined in 20 normal and 8 language-handicapped young children. (Author)

The purpose of this study was to explore whether 13 children with specific language impairment (SLI; ages 5;1-8;0 [years;months]) were as proficient as typically developing age- and vocabulary-matched children in the production of finite and nonfinite complement clauses. Preschool children with SLI have marked difficulties with verb-related…

Reports three studies concerning individual differences in children's use of consonants during early phonological development. The findings indicate that these differences fall within a predictable range, that the linguistic environment cannot account for several of them, and that they are partly due to variations in the choice of lexical items.…

Examination of the spontaneous speech of 10 English-speaking children (ages 3 to 5) with specific language impairment revealed evidence of the functional categories of determiner, inflection, and complementizer. However, compared to younger children with comparable mean utterance lengths, these children showed lower percentages of use of many…

Examines the communicative functions served by the lexical usage of normal and language impaired children whose speech was limited to single word utterances. (EKN)

The study found that eight specifically language-impaired children (ages four and five) were more limited than eight normally developing children (ages two and three, matched for mean utterance length) in the use of both subject case marking and verb morphology. A relationship between the two types of usage was found in both groups of children.…

Lexical diversity of 53 children with specific language impairment (SLI) (ages 3-7) was compared to 91 typical peers and younger children matched for mean length of utterance in words (MLUw). Older subgroups showed higher lexical diversity. At lower MLUw levels, children with SLI showed higher diversity than the younger children. (Contains…

Mothers in 22 mother-child dyads read 5 experimental stories aloud to their children and to an adult during which the durations of 7 function-word vowels were measured. Only function-word vowels in the final position (rather than initial or medial) were significantly longer in child-directed rather than adult-directed speech. (Author/DB)