Seneca elder Sandy Dowdy and her granddaughter Autumn Crouse direct a language nest school for children aged two to five years in a small longhouse-shaped building, "Ganöhsesge:kha:' Hë:nödeyë:sta'":, or the Faithkeepers School, on the Seneca Allegany Territory in upstate New York. They practice immersion teaching and use forms of…

This study investigated novel word acquisition by 18- and 24-month-old children in the context of adult referential behavior independent of variations in salience. Findings suggest that 24-month olds use referential intent of the speaker to learn new words, but when learning, they may have a less secure grasp on the meaning of speakers'…

Longitudinal studies of the application of a paraphrasing model to 18- to 28-month-olds indicated that mean length of utterance was significantly correlated with realized and paraphrased frequencies of several linguistic items in the subjects' corpora. The model was productive for examining children's corpora of speech and the linguistic…

This study compared verbal comprehension, verbal production, and gesture production in 40 children (ages 10-49 months) with Down Syndrome (DS) and 40 normally developing children (ages 8-17 months). DS children showed a dissociation between verbal comprehension and production but synchronous development between vocal lexical comprehension and…

A longitudinal study of four 17- to 33-month-olds revealed that their linguistic selection at the one-word stage was governed by principles of informativeness, while the two-word stage was characterized by new, or a combination of new and old, information. (Author/CB)

This paper discusses why and how parents of children with hearing impairments participate in the auditory-verbal approach. The components of therapy sessions are outlined, and techniques are described for developing listening skills, speech production, language, and communication in infants and toddlers. Effective teaching strategies are reviewed…

Discusses pre-linguistic and linguistic stages of language acquisition that are part of a continuum of receptivity and communication every child experiences in the first 3 years of life. Suggests parents assist language development by being sympathetic to each developmental turning point, providing the right emotional climate for expression, and…