Describe studies in which day-long recordings were made of nine-year-old children's spontaneous speech. Results indicate that: (1) children aged five to 15 speak some 20,000 words of discourse per day in about two to three hours of pure speaking time; (2) they have an active vocabulary of some 3,000 word-form types. (SED)

Provides evidence that in producing voiceless stops in terms of voice-onset-time values, children first overshoot adult values and then only gradually draw back toward adult values. (Author/RL)

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)

The Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) communication skills lexicon, compiled for use in the development of elementary instruction, is a set of words used by children between kindergarten and sixth grade. Although the lexicon was originally derived from the most comprehensive and up-to-date sources available, the major studies on which the…

Criticism of much of the previous research into the syntax of children's language. (RD)

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)

Traditionally linguists have considered pidgin languages as corrupted constructions of European vocabulary based on African or Asian syntax. Recent systematic studies of these languages show complex patterns of mutual influence on many levels. To explain the structural similarities of pidgin languages, some linguists, such as Keith Whinnom, have…

This is a report on an investigation of the correct production of /s/ in spontaneous speech of children. A greater incidence of incorrect production was found for pre-boundary /s/ than for /s/ in other lexical positions. Lexical position is related to articulatory inconsistencies in child speech. (SC)

This research report examines the pronunciation that children give to synthetic words containing vowel-cluster spellings and analyzes the observed pronunciations in relation to common English words containing the same vowel clusters. The pronunciations associated with vowel-cluster spellings are among the most unpredictable letter-sound…

This article summarizes early work on child language learning and reviews more recent work. It appears that recent research shows that children's linguistic cues, spoken by adults, are slower, less varied and more concrete than adult-adult speech. (Available from North-Holland Publishing Co., P. O. Box 211, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.) (CHK)

The ability of young children to communicate at the time they produce their first words was studied, with particular reference to the question of whether children are able to modify their requests depending on the adult's response. The subjects were four children ranging in age from 15 to 18 months; the data were their requests of adults coded…

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…

Nine transcripts of recorded conversation of German children ranging from 10 through 19 years of age are of special interest to linguists working on child language. The recordings, made in Heidelberg, Berlin, Hanover, and Urach/Wurttemberg, include elicited behaviors called "linguistic activities". The interviewers attempt to elicit: (1)…

The crib talk reported here of a 2;2-2;4-year-old boy replicates the phenomenon of crib talk reported in previous studies by other investigators. This study adds a corpus of mother-child interaction (MCI) and tests one aspect of the hypothesis that crib talk may enhance production of linguistic forms at a later date. Transcripts of monologues were…

This study investigated the linguistic characteristics of speech addressed to the child and the features of the verbal environment critical for learning language. The study focused on the prosodic and paralinguistic features of adult speech to the young child. Adult speech directed to children was compared to other kinds of systematic speech…