Four 17- to 21-month-old normally developing, and four 32- to 35-month-old language impaired children, classified as "referential" speakers or "expressive" speakers, produced linguistic features in clusters, and manifested play behaviors that were consistent with the children's pattern of lexical distribution. (Author/MC)

Data on four infants between the ages of 12 and 20 months were collected to answer two questions about children's communication behavior. (1) Is there a correspondence between communicative intentions expressed in gestures and vocal utterances? If both spring from common organismic tendencies, it should be possible to discern an "indicating"…

Piaget has suggested that a child's language reflects the degree to which he is able to take into account the point of view of his listener. His inability to do so results in what Piaget calls egocentric speech whereas what Piaget calls socialized speech indicates that the child actually adopts his listener's viewpoint and engages in an exchange…

Author contends that we judge people too harshly by their speech. He advocates accepting children's dialects first then teaching them proper speech patterns. (AF)

Syntactic analysis (kernel and matrix sentence frame types and transformational usage) of speech of fluent and disfluent preschool children revealed the fluent group using more double-base transformations and both groups comparable on the distribution of usage for sentence frame types. (Author/KW)

A summer program for disadvantaged children in grades 1 through 7 was designed to enrich and enhance the student's language experiences and to improve their communicative abilities. (Author/EJS)

Discusses the variation and stability of mother speech patterns across individuals. Analyzes the functionally coded speech of 11 mothers and provides a typology of mother styles, based on the intentions of mothers to direct or converse with their children. (EKN)

Evidence of semantically based orderings of phrasal coordinations in child speech is explored. Speech samples from two children are analyzed to show that such sequences occur frequently, are internally consistent, and are part of children's active repertoire of referential and expressive acts at an early age. The samples were obtained from one…

Current thinking of specialists in the study of language learning provides the basis of this book. The 12 chapters of the book and their authors are as follows: 1. Introduction--Charles A. Ferguson; 2. The Acquisition of Language in Infant and Child--Martin D. S. Braine; 3. Development of Native Language Skills beyond the Early Years--John B.…

Tests the hypothesis that the extent to which the durations of pauses (silences within the utterances of a single speaker) and switching pauses (silences between the utterances of 2 speakers) in the speech of children in conversation become similar (i.e., exhibit conversational congruence) is positively related to age. (BRT)

Describes adjustments in speech patterns made by two- and three-year-olds when talking to their 14-month-old siblings and compares these changes with those made by mothers addressing their babies. Individual differences between the children indicate two types of influence on the adjustments made--pragmatic and emotional. (EKN)

A review of recent research findings on how a child develops a vocabulary and acquires the ability to express himself. Bibliography. (RB)

Maternal directives to 10- and 18-month-old children were analyzed for verbal and nonverbal aspects. The findings emphasize the multimodal nature of mothers' messages and the way language occurs in an action context and not as isolated output. There was no indication that verbal output replaces nonverbal at this age, but the verbal and nonverbal…

A study was undertaken to separate elements of maternal speech heavily influenced by the children's language levels from those representing the mothers' consistent style or strategy for "teaching" language. A striking similarity was found between speech mothers used with their daughters and that used with their daughters' friends. (MSE)