Noting that young children learn to talk at different ages but within certain developmental boundaries, this document presents two charts to help parents facilitate their toddler's speech. The first chart lists characteristics to look for in a growing, healthy baby at various ages between 3 months and 24 months, and suggestions for when to talk to…

This book is designed to provide practical advice to parents and educators on the language acquisition process. Citing numerous case studies and anecdotal examples, it explains how children learn to talk and acquire language. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to language acquisition, explaining the components, forms, and structure of language.…

A practicum study, recognizing the expressive language delays of inner-city kindergarten children, implemented two strategies to increase their expressive language ability and their mean length of utterance. The target population, 14 kindergarten students who demonstrated vocabulary development delays on the Brigance Kindergarten Screening Test,…

The nature of children's communication processes of listening, speaking, reading, and drawing/writing that occur during story time is explored in this paper, which describes story time as a literacy event. The framework that children develop during story-time can serve as a vehicle for language arts instruction. In helping children cultivate…

This book addresses child's language learning in a manner designed to be understandable to the nonspecialist. The major areas covered are: (1) learning one's first language; (2) the role of adults in the child's language learning; (3) discovering the structure of language: phonology; (4) discovering the structure of language: syntax; (5) learning…

This paper reports on two aspects of dyadic communication skills: verbal imitation, and response to questions and commands, as they relate to the development of semantic functions in three English-speaking children. The children, aged 16, 21 and 22 months, were unobtrusively videotaped during weekly free play sessions with their mothers. The…

Two major strategies for linguistically encoding an idea or proposition are suggested. The first strategy involves encoding an idea in the space of a single utterance, while the second strategy conveys the proposition through a sequence of two or more utterances. The tendency has been to focus on discourse as a composite of sentences (the first…

This paper reports on a longitudinal study of the acquisition of the voicing contrast in American-English work-initial stop consonants, as revealed through instrumental analysis of voice onset time characteristics. Four monolingual children were recorded at approximately two week intervals, beginning when the children were about 1;6. Data provide…

The acquisition of rules for formulating causative verbs was studied with children over a period of a few years. Most of the data is based on the spontaneous speech of the author's two daughters, from age 2;6 to 6;2 and from age 2;4 to 3;11. It was hypothesized that there are at least two prerequisites for the child's formulation of a general rule…

The significance of three mothers' speech for their infants' language development is considered in a continuing longitudinal study. The study began when the children (two females and one male) were 5 and 6 months of age and will continue until the subjects are 3 years old. In the speech data reported the children were from 6 to 18 months of age.…

This paper discusses Lee and Canter's procedure for assessing child language development as an example of how psycholinguistics is beginning to enter the language clinic. The procedure includes recording and transcribing examples of children's sentences, then scoring them to yield a Developmental Sentence Score (DDS). This procedure was compared…

Clarification of one aspect of Jensen's model of cognitive abilities provided the impetus for this study. Jensen found that sentence construction as a mediator facilitated learning of paired associates, except when kindergarteners were used as subjects. The purpose of the present study is to determine whether the failure of the mediators to…

The University of Victoria and the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs sponsored a 4-week prekindergarten, preschool, and orientation program for Indian children living on 4 reserves in the southern region of Vancouver Island. The 3 groups of children served were 4- and 5-year-olds (prekindergarten), 5- and 6-year-olds (preschool), and 7-…

To determine the relative effectiveness of different methods of preschool educational intervention for disadvantaged children, comparisons were made of five programs whose levels of structure ranged from the traditional nursery school to a highly structured preschool. Subjects were 79 4-year-olds representing a wide range of ability levels.…

The relationship between oral reading ability and the use of structure (function) words was examined in a dissertation study which hypothesized that the use of structure words in verbal discourse would be greater in children who have no difficulty in oral reading than in children who experience difficulty. Structure words were identified as those…