A paper presented at Anglo-American Seminar on Teaching English to the Linguistically Deprived (Walsall, England, June 1968). (Editor/RD)

In three experiments, 9-month-olds were given the opportunity to induce specific phonological patterns from manipulated syllable structure, consonant voicing position, and segmental position. Infants were then familiarized with fluent speech containing words that either fit or violated these patterns. Subsequent testing revealed that infants…

This study investigated two-month-old infants' memory for phonetic information using the high-amplitude-sucking procedure (HAS). Specifically, the study explored whether the availability of prosodic organization enhances infants' memory for the phonetic information they hear. After a baseline measure was obtained, infant sucking resulted in a…

Results are described of a study of vocalizations of two female infants, classified as cry, discomfort, and vegetative sounds, recorded between one and eight weeks of age. The implications for later speech development are discussed. (Author/RM)

This guide outlines in chart form the speech, hearing, and language behaviors which may be expected from children of ages 3 months through 5 years. It is designed to indicate progress and to alert parents and professional personnel to deviations from normal development. The information, in question-answer form, sketches behaviors for nine age…

This study constitutes the beginning of a longitudinal investigation of phonological development of four children from birth to 2 years. Little variation was found in mean fundamental frequency. Duration, within-utterance range and variability did show developmental change. (RM)

Data on intentional communication by 15 normal children (ages 11-14 months at outset) were collected at three stages (prelinguistic, one-word, multiword) over the course of a year. All displayed acts for regulating behavior, engaging in social interaction, and referencing joint attention at each stage but with changing proportions. (Author/VW)

The schema hypothesis proposed by Kagan and Lewis was used to make predictions concerning the preferences of infants 3 to 14 months old for speech stimuli. An operant response method was used in determining the infants' preferences for inflected, monotone, and scrambled natural speech stimuli. (MS)

A core task in language acquisition is mapping words onto objects, actions, and events. Two studies investigated how children learn to map novel labels onto novel objects. Study 1 investigated whether 10-month-olds use both perceptual and social cues to learn a word. Study 2, a control study, tested whether infants paired the label with a…

The following are sketched in outline form: (1) functional antecedents and their implications for language--assimilation, accommodation, circular reactions/ feedback processes, classification, discrimination, functional equivalence, representation, transformation, communications; (2) semantic antecedents and their implications for language--human…

Vocalizations of two female infants, recorded over a five-week period after the first emergence of cooing were studied. It was found that the features of the more primitive sound types regrouped themselves in comfort sounds. The implications for theories of prespeech development are discussed. (EJS)

The effect of four social learning conditions on early language acquisition was explored, along with comparisons between learning whole words and learning the component sounds of the words. Subjects were 20 infants aged 9 to 15 months. (MS)

The antecedents of verbal behavior, together with the teaching skills of the adult linguistic community, probably constitute all the necessary bases for language acquisition. As they seemed to be sufficient for the explanation of all the known phenomena, an assumption of an innate linguistic language acquisition device was rejected as superfluous.…

Home visits and parental diaries revealed that children of deaf parents produced their initial recognizable sign at 8.2 months of age, attained a lexicon of 10 signs at 13.5 months, and combined signs at 16.1 months. Children did not use signs to name new things until 12.6 months, typically after they had demonstrated communicative pointing. (BC)

Analyzed vocalizations/verbalizations from children acquiring English or French in later single-word period to identify trochaic bias. Found that neither language's vocalizations were exclusively trochaic. French/English differences in iambic productions and acoustic realization of accent were traceable to adult input. Distribution of trochaic and…