How to help babies and young children right from birth to become competent in talking as well as emergent literacy is illustrated by research findings as well as with specific clinical stories. Both kinds of knowledge can serve to galvanize parents and teachers to increase awareness of infant and preschool language development and the crucial role…

Twenty-nine infants aged 1;1 and their mothers were videotaped while interacting with toys for 18 minutes. Six experimental stimuli were presented to elicit infant communicative bids in two communicative intent contexts--proto-declarative and proto-imperative. Mothers' verbal responses to infants' gestural and non-gestural communicative bids were…

A study of the use of the complex Finnish morphological rule system in 45 children, aged 20-24 months, examined the children's inflection of nouns and verbs in speech characteristic of everyday Finnish. Analysis of the correct, unanswered, and incorrect test items found six classes of errors, which were then examined for clues to the underlying…