Child phonologists have made varying assumptions concerning the nature of phonological characteristics of children's imitative utterances and their relationship to the characteristics of spontaneous utterances. This study examined this relationship in children in early Stage I. A task was devised which permitted an inspection of children's unsolicited imitations of nonsense words reflecting syllabic shapes and consonants in and out of the child's phonological system. The results are discussed with respect to production constraints, phonological idioms, and selection and avoidance rules operative in imitative speech during this period of development. The findings indicated that while these imitative utterances were subject to the same production constraints they were not subject to the same selection and avoidance rules operative in spontaneous speech.

A case study is presented of the babbling monologues produced by a Dutch child in the six weeks following acquisition of the first word. The relationship between word and babbling development is investigated. There appears to be a continuous interplay between both aspects of speech development: new words may influence the character and the course of babbling, whereas babbling in turn may give rise to phonological preferences for selecting other new words. It is concluded that the analysis of concurrent babbling may provide clues for explaining the highly variable phenomena of early word production.

This study examined whether pitch patterns of prelinguistic vocalizations could discriminate between social vocalizations, uttered apparently with the intention to communicate, and ‘private’ speech, related to solitary activities as an expression of ‘thinking’. Four healthy ten month old English-speaking infants (2 boys and 2 girls) were simultaneously video- and audiorecorded in their homes under two conditions: (A) when the infant was playing with mother, and (B) when the infant was alone. One hundred and fifty-six vocalizations were classified as ‘communicative’, if accompanied by non-vocal communicative behaviour, or as ‘investigative’, if accompanied by explorative activities. For the acoustic analysis, an automatic PITCH PATTERN RECOGNITION (PPR) software system was developed. The PPR-system could distinguish ‘communicative’ from ‘investigative’ vocalizations with an overall accuracy of 91·67%. These findings confirm that prelinguistic vocalizations might serve both as means of purposeful communication and as a tool of thought. These are the functions later assumed by language.

The purpose of the present study was to explore the contribution of phonological and general language skills to reading fluency of pointed and unpointed Hebrew scripts. Reading, language and memory tasks were performed by 48 fifth-grade monolingual native Hebrew speakers. Results showed that the most marked predictor for both pointed and unpointed reading texts was the morphological measure, whereas the phonological awareness measure contributed to neither of them. The semantic and syntactic measures contributed only to unpointed text reading fluency. The discussion highlights how readers in script, such as unpointed Hebrew, rely on general language skills in order to achieve fluent reading.

Young children's initial categories often are not identical to the adult category labelled by the same word. Eventually, children's categories must evolve to correspond to the adult standard. The purpose of this study was to consider the relative effectiveness of four input strategies in inducing the child to learn the adult-appropriate label and begin to form a new category. Fifty-six children aged 2;0 were taught new labels for objects that they included in categories labelled by different names. Comprehension and production post-tests were then administered. As expected, the most effective strategy involved labelling an object and providing both a physical demonstration and a verbal description of important attributes that made the object a member of the adult-appropriate category. The label plus physical demonstration strategy was next most effective. Neither the label plus verbal description strategy nor the label only strategy was effective for children of this age. Results also indicated that these 24 month olds did not yet honour the convention of mutual exclusivity of basic level categories.

This article addresses the effect of communicative activity on the use of language and gesture by school-age children. The present study examined oral narratives and explanations produced by children aged six and ten years on the basis of several linguistic and gestural measures. Results showed that age affects both gestural and linguistic behaviour, supporting previous findings that multimodal discourse continues to develop during the school-age years. The task (narration vs. explanation) also had clear effects on the use of language and gesture: gestures and subordinate markers were more frequent in explanations than in narratives, whereas cohesion markers were more often used in narratives. Altogether, these results show partly distinctive developmental patterns between narrative monologic discourse behaviour and explanatory behaviour in the context of dialogue and question–answer exchanges.

Understanding how linguistic cues map to the environment is crucial for early language comprehension and may provide a way for bootstrapping and learning words. Research has suggested that learning how plural syntax maps to the perceptual environment may show a trajectory in which children first learn surrounding cues (verbs, modifiers) before a full mastery of the noun morpheme alone. The Spanish plural system of simple codas, dominated by one allomorph -s, and with redundant agreement markers, may facilitate early understanding of how plural linguistic cues map to novel referents. Two-year-old Mexican children correctly identified multiple novel object referents when multiple verbal cues in a phrase indicated plurality as well as in instances when the noun morphology in novel nouns was the only indicator of plurality. These results demonstrate Spanish-speaking children's ability to use plural noun inflectional morphology to infer novel word referents which may have implications for their word learning.

Although much research has investigated children's use of metaphoric language, methodological concerns raise questions about the conclusions, and it remains unclear whether preschoolers can produce metaphors. These studies employed a new methodology to test children's ability to produce metaphors incorporated into metaphoric compounds. In two studies, 59 children aged 2;8–4;3, 63 children aged 4;4–6;1, and 34 adults participated in elicited production tasks. In Study 1, subjects in the COMPOUND condition corrected a puppet's incorrect compound labels for pictures that had metaphoric resemblances to other objects (e.g. ‘leaf-bug’ for a bug shaped like a stick). Subjects in the NON-METAPHORIC condition heard incorrect compounds describing pictures without obvious metaphoric resemblance (e.g. ‘leaf-bug’ for a round black beetle). Children in the REVERSAL condition heard compounds with nouns reversed (e.g. ‘bug-leaf’ for the stick-bug) to discover whether children distinguished between the literal and metaphoric labels. Study 2 provided an additional test of children's metaphoric–literal distinction. Results showed that children as young as 3;0 produced intentional, appropriate metaphors incorporated into compound nouns when the stimuli and puppet's labels primed recognition of metaphoric similarity and compound production. Moreover, children showed evidence of a distinction between literal and metaphoric labels. The data show that preschool children have an early ability to use metaphoric language but that significant developmental change occurs between the ages of 3;0 and 5;0 as well as beyond 5;0. Additionally, metaphoric language in preschoolers is not limited to single-word renamings.

The relation between text and idiom comprehension in children with poor text comprehension skills was investigated longitudinally. In the first phase of the study, six-year-old first graders with different levels of text comprehension were compared in an idiom and sentence comprehension task. Text comprehension was shown to be more closely related to idiom comprehension than sentence comprehension. The follow-up study, carried out eight months later on less-skilled text comprehenders, investigated whether an improvement in text comprehension was paralleled by an improvement in idiom comprehension. The development of sentence comprehension was also taken into account. Children who improved in text comprehension also improved in idiom comprehension; this improvement was, instead, weakly related to an improvement in sentence comprehension. The relationship between text and idiom comprehension is discussed in the light of the Global Elaboration Model (Levorato & Cacciari, 1995).

In this case study we investigate how early a developing bilingual exposed simultaneously to English and Spanish can make appropriate language choices. We propose two methodological requirements for studies of this kind: (1) detailed records of the development of the child's lexicon; and (2) data collection in more than one language context. Our own study relies on detailed records of the child's cumulative vocabulary from the first word at ten months, and on weekly audiovideo recordings in both English and Spanish contexts from age 1;3. Analysis of the data shows a strong tendency for the language of the child's utterances to match that of the context at ages 1;7–1;8.

This study analyzes how others engage rural and urban Mozambican infants during naturalistic observations, and how the proportion of time spent in different engagements relates to infants' language development over the second year of life. Using an extended version of Bakeman and Adamson's (1984) categorization of infant engagement, we investigated to what extent a detailed analysis of infant engagement can contribute to our understanding of vocabulary development in natural settings. In addition, we explored how the different infant engagements relate to vocabulary size, and how these differ between the two communities. Results show that rural infants spend significantly more time in forms of solitary engagement, whereas urban infants spend more time in forms of triadic joint engagement. In regard to correlations with reported productive vocabulary, we find that dyadic persons engagement (i.e. interactions not about concrete objects) has positive correlations with vocabulary measures in both rural and urban communities. In addition, we find that triadic coordinated joint attention has a positive relationship with vocabulary in the urban community, but a contrasting negative correlation with vocabulary in the rural community. These similarities and differences are explained, based upon the parenting beliefs and socialization practices of different prototypical learning environments. Overall, this study concludes that the extended categorization provides a valuable contribution to the analysis of infant engagement and their relation to language acquisition, especially for analyzing naturalistic observations as compared to semi-structured studies. Moreover, with respect to vocabulary development, Mozambican infants appear to benefit strongest from dyadic Persons engagement, while they do not necessarily benefit from joint attention, as tends to be the case for children from industrial, developed communities.

The fundamental frequencies (F0) of infant cries were analysed to determine if: (1) mean cry F0 differed as a function of the sex of the infant, and (2) mean cry F0 differed due to the stimulus evoking the cry. The results of this study indicate that there are no significant differences in mean cry F0 as a function of infant's sex or cry-evoking stimulus. However, there was tendency for male infants to have higher mean F0 than females. The results suggest that the infants' F0 may confuse listeners attempting to make perceptual judgments about the source and nature of the cry.

Fourteen full-term, healthy, three-month-old infants were observed during a total of 15 minutes spontaneous face-to-face interaction with their mothers. Facial and manual actions, gaze direction and vocalizations were coded. The infants' cooing vocalizations were categorized into syllabic and vocalic sounds. Index-finger extension occurred frequently in sequence with syllabic sounds, which are speech-like vocalizations, but rarely occurred in sequence with vocalic sounds. No other categories of nonvocal behaviours showed such a relationship. In a subsequent experiment, the infants experienced either conversational turn-taking or random responsiveness from their mothers. In the turn-taking condition, the infants produced a higher ratio of syllabic to vocalic sounds, and a higher frequency of index-finger extension. These results suggest a strong connection between speech and the pointing gesture long before the infant can actually talk.

This longitudinal study examined the predictive validity of the MacArthur Communicative Developmental Inventories-Short Form (CDI-SF), a parent report questionnaire about children's language development (Fenson, Pethick, Renda, Cox, Dale & Reznick, 2000). Data were first gathered from parents on the CDI-SF vocabulary scores for seventy-six children (mean age=1 ; 10). Four years later (mean age=6 ; 1), children were assessed on language outcomes (expressive vocabulary, syntax, semantics and pragmatics) and code-related skills, including phonemic awareness, word recognition and decoding skills. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that early expressive vocabulary accounted for 17% of the variance in picture vocabulary, 11% of the variance in syntax, and 7% of the variance in semantics, while not accounting for any variance in pragmatics in kindergarten. CDI-SF scores did not predict code-related skills in kindergarten. The importance of early vocabulary skills for later language development and CDI-SF as a valuable research tool are discussed.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) vary widely in their ability to use tense/agreement inflections depending on the type of language being acquired, a fact that current accounts of SLI have tried to explain. Finnish provides an important test case for these accounts because: (1) verbs in the first and second person permit null subjects whereas verbs in the third person do not; and (2) tense and agreement inflections are agglutinating and thus one type of inflection can appear without the other. Probes were used to compare the verb inflection use of Finnish-speaking children with SLI, and both age-matched and younger typically developing children. The children with SLI were less accurate, and the pattern of their errors did not match predictions based on current accounts of SLI. It appears that children with SLI have difficulty learning complex verb inflection paradigms apart from any problem specific to tense and agreement.

An attempt is made to explain how the child comes to relate his acquisition of the form of language with the categories that he is establishing in the organization of his non-linguistic experience, by hypothesizing a basis for language in pre-linguistic cognitive development. The child's task is seen as being to match the organization of language with the cognitive organization that he has already imposed upon his experience. This is made possible, it is argued, because the organization of meaning within the language system is closely related to the universal categories of early experience. Evidence from recordings of a small sample of children in the early stages of language acquisition is advanced in support of this hypothesis, and the results of the linguistic analysis are discussed in the light of findings from the Genevan school of developmental psychology.

This work describes the importance of the transcription process in studies of speech and language acquisition. Using data collected from a hearing child of deaf parents, the three authors derived independent transcriptions of the same speech sample and systematically compared their transcripts with each other and with the best estimate of the speaker's actual productions. The resultant transcripts were used to produce two descriptions of this child's phonological system, one based on a liberal estimate and one on a conservative estimate of the potential error in the transcripts. Discussion includes suggestions for deriving percentages of inter-transcriber agreement and the utility of such figures as a metric of transcription difficulty as well as transcriber ability.

The present study determined whether parenting style, defined by control strategies varying in power-assertion mediated the established relation between maternal language usage (grammar and semantics) and child language (grammar, semantics and pragmatics) during toddlerhood (n=60). Based upon their use of control strategies mothers were categorized into continuum-of-control groups (i.e. high guidance (HG), high control (HC) or high negative control (HNC)). Mothers in the high negative control group, who characteristically used high levels of prohibitions and commands, had children who performed relatively poorly overall on the language measures (i.e. MLU, number of bound morphemes, number of different words and use of language functions). In contrast, children of mothers in the HG and HC groups exhibited more advanced language usage overall. The relation between maternal and child language usage was mediated by parenting style for child pragmatics and partially for child grammar.

Children who require augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems while they are in the process of acquiring language face unique challenges because they use graphic symbols for communication. In contrast to the situation of typically developing children, they use different modalities for comprehension (auditory) and expression (visual). This study explored the ability of three- and four-year-old children without disabilities to perform tasks involving sequences of graphic symbols. Thirty participants were asked to transpose spoken simple sentences into graphic symbols by selecting individual symbols corresponding to the spoken words, and to interpret graphic symbol utterances by selecting one of four photographs corresponding to a sequence of three graphic symbols. The results showed that these were not simple tasks for the participants, and few of them performed in the expected manner – only one in transposition, and only one-third of participants in interpretation. Individual response strategies in some cases lead to contrasting response patterns. Children at this age level have not yet developed the skills required to deal with graphic symbols even though they have mastered the corresponding spoken language structures.

The current study investigated whether point-accompanying characteristics, like vocalizations and hand shape, differentiate infants' underlying motives of prelinguistic pointing. We elicited imperative (requestive) and declarative (expressive and informative) pointing acts in experimentally controlled situations, and analyzed accompanying characteristics. Experiment 1 revealed that prosodic characteristics of point-accompanying vocalizations distinguished requestive from both expressive and informative pointing acts, with little differences between the latter two. In addition, requestive points were more often realized with the whole hand than the index finger, while this was the opposite for expressive and informative acts. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1, revealing distinct prosodic characteristics for requestive pointing also when the referent was distal and when it had an index-finger shape. Findings reveal that beyond the social context, point-accompanying vocalizations give clues to infants' underlying intentions when pointing.