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)

This study attempted to test the notion that the reinforcing stimuli which maintain high rates of speech may not consist solely of events extrinsic to the person but may involve (sensory) stimulation generated by the behavior itself. (Author)

A series of three experiments was conducted to assess the comprehension of four types of cross-modal (synesthetic) similarities in children and adults. Both perceptual and verbal (metaphoric) modes were tested. (PCB)

Kindergarten children were observed in a classroom situation to discover communicative competence in the sociolinguistic area. These children demonstrated competency in awareness of regularities in use of language in the classroom, ability to publicize confusions, and variations in ways of speaking. (DF)

The use of the verbs "go" and "come" was examined in the spontaneous speech of seven two-year-olds. As verbs of motion, the words were used in the context of describing the contour of movement rather than as means of relating end-points of a journey. This is considered crucial in explaining children's difficulty in discriminating the verbs in…

Author brings together from some major sources what we know about metaphor and suggests some questions for systematic study concerning children and metaphor. (Editor)

Case studies of a few naturally bilingual children are reported in the context of a larger research project with bilingual children living in Rome. Studies focused on personality traits present from birth and concomitant with bilingual development. Data confirm full psychological normality on the part of bilingual children. (Author/AMH)

The results showed the schizophrenic group to be similar to the controls on verbal and full-scale intelligence measures but significantly inferior on performance measures. The schizophrenic group also showed a general disadvantage in paired associate learning, with a trend toward specific differential difficulty with words as stimulus items.…

Investigates the predictability of cognitive differences at 12 months from infant and maternal behaviors at 4 months. Overall, the results show that some individual differences in cognition may be predictable across the first year of life. (Author/RH)

Found no correlations between types of play behavior and speech measures, that identification of objects upon verbal request was not related to any type of play behavior, and that comprehension of verbal requests for functional or representational play was positively correlated with the display of such play. Journal availability: J. B. Lippincott…

This paper discusses C. Chomsky's 1969 paper on children's syntactic development and the subsequent studies made to test her findings. Later studies indicate that Chomsky's results were not clearly differentiated, and a slight alteration in procedure changes results significantly. (CHK)

Compares the many-perspectives account of lexical acquisition--which proposes that children learn to take alternative perspectives along with the words they acquire--to the one-perspective account--which proposes that children are at first able to use only one term to talk about an object or event. Provides evidence from a variety of sources that…

When encountering a word for the first time, information about it is connected to information from the context. There are four levels of word knowledge: never having seen it before; having heard of it but not knowing what it means; recognizing it in context; and knowing it. A full and flexible knowledge of a word involves understanding the core…

Developmental changes in the expression of superordinates in children's word definitions were studied with 96 elementary school students. Superordination increased significantly and changed qualitatively with age, although across grades children produced more superordinates for nouns than for adjectives or verbs. (SLD)