The influence of phonological selection and avoidance upon early lexical acquisition was examined within an experimental paradigm. During 10 bi-weekly experimental sessions, 12 children (1;0.21 to 1;3.15 at the outset) were presented with 16 contrived lexical concepts, each consisting of a nonsense word and four unfamiliar referents. For each child, eight words involved phonological characteristics which had been evidenced in production (in) and eight had characteristics which had not been evidenced in production or selection (out), in words were produced imitatively and non-imitatively in greater numbers and in earlier sessions than OUT words, providing evidence for the influence of selection and avoidance. The degree of phonetic accuracy of these two types of productions did not differ. These findings are discussed in terms of a proposal concerning early phonological representation and acquisition.

This study focuses on parent–child book reading and its connection to the development of a theory of mind. First, parents were asked to report about frequency of parent–child storybook reading at home. Second, mothers were asked to read four picture-books to thirty-four children between 4;0 and 5;0. Both frequency of parent–child storybook reading at home, and mother's use of mental state terms in picture-books reading tasks were significantly associated with success on false belief tasks, after partialling out a number of potential mediators such as age of children, verbal IQ, paternal education, and words used by mothers in joint picture-book reading. Among the different mental state references (cognitive terms, desires, emotions and perceptions), it was found that the frequency and variety of cognitive terms, but also the frequency of emotional terms correlated positively with children's false belief performance. Relationships between mental state language and theory of mind are discussed.

Four children (aged 3;9 to 5;5) were recorded talking to different listeners (adult, peer, baby, and baby doll) and role-playing a ‘baby just learning how to talk’. As a measure of the children's responsiveness to situational cues, each sample was analysed for formal and functional characteristics. The children's speech was different on many of the measures when talking to a baby or doll as compared with the speech to a peer or adult. Speech to a baby doll was similar to that addressed to a real baby, indicating that feedback is not necessary for speech modifications to occur. In the role-playing situation, children changed and simplified their speech when talking as a baby.

This longitudinal study of how preverbal infants communicate with their mothers utilized the situation in which the infant was seated in a highchair at lunchtime. This situation predisposed infants to use communication as a means, since they were often unable to achieve their goals without assistance. It was found that infants' communicative attempts were often unsuccessful; the present study focussed on how infants and mothers worked to establish the infants' intents after communication failures. In the preverbal negotiation of failed messages infants direct communicative behaviours to their mothers which their mothers fail to comprehend immediately, NEGOTIATIONS occur when mothers help infants make their intents clear. Negotiation episodes have four components: the infant's initial signal, the mother's comprehension failure, infant repairs and episode outcome. Changes in these components provide much information about how infants' communicative skills evolve during the transition to a linguistically based communication system. Negotiation episodes are contrasted with episodes called IMMEDIATE SUCCESSES in which the mother readily comprehends the intent behind the infant's signal, and MISSED ATTEMPTS in which the mother fails to pick up on the infant's signal. Taken together these three types of communicative episode reveal a degree of persistence and creativity on the part of the preverbal infant that is surprising in the light of prior research. Such episodes further reveal that the course of preverbal communication is NOT smooth.

This study examined the effects of being born very preterm on children's early language development using prospective longitudinal data from a representative regional cohort of 90 children born very preterm (gestational age <33 weeks and/or birth weight <1,500 grams) and a comparison sample of 102 children born full term (gestational age 38–41 weeks). The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Sentences (CDI-WS) was used to assess children's language development at age 2 ; 0 (corrected for gestational age at birth). Clear linear relationships were found between gestational age at birth and later language outcomes, with decreasing gestational age being associated with poorer parent-reported language skills. Specifically, children born extremely preterm (<28 weeks' gestation) tended to perform less well than those born very preterm (28–32 weeks' gestation), who in turn performed worse than children born full term (38–41 weeks' gestation). This pattern of findings was evident across a range of outcomes spanning vocabulary size and quality of word use, as well as morphological and syntactic complexity. Importantly, associations between gestational age at birth and language outcomes persisted after statistical control for child and family factors correlated with both preterm birth and language development. These findings demonstrate the presence of pervasive delays in the early language development of children born very preterm. They also highlight the importance of gestational age in predicting later language risk in this population of infants.

English-speaking children (N = 91) who were attending French schools (bilingual group) were given a battery of phonological awareness tests in kindergarten and in grade 1. At the time of kindergarten testing the mean age of the children was 5:9. Their performance was compared to age-matched English-speaking children (N = 72) attending English schools (monolingual group). The bilingual children showed heightened levels of phonological awareness skills in kindergarten in the area of onset-rime awareness. By grade 1, the pattern of group differences was more complex. The monolingual and bilingual children performed similarly on onset-rime segmentation tasks. The monolingual children had higher phoneme awareness scores than their French-schooled peers; this result is interpreted to reflect the role of literacy instruction on phoneme awareness development. In comparison, the bilingual children had higher syllable segmentation scores than their monolingual peers. This result is interpreted to reflect the role of second language input on phonological awareness.

Until now, although there has been research on the acquisition of intonation and stress, there has been no systematic study of the acquisition of lexical tone. Based on data collected during eight months of field work with 17 children of Mandarin-speaking families in Taipei, we have found that (1) tone acquisition is accomplished within a relatively short period of time; (2) mastery of tones occurs well in advance of mastery of seg-mentals; (3) the Mandarin high-level and falling tones are acquired before the rising and dipping tones; (4) the rising and dipping tones are substituted for each other throughout the tone acquisition process; (5) unstressed syllables are treated as if they were stressed, the tone assigned to them being an approximation of the phonetically conditioned pitch which they carry; (6) the tone sandhi phenomena associated with the dipping tone in Mandarin are acquired with very little error as soon as propositional utterances begin to be created. Explanations for these facts can be given in terms of the relative ease of learning to control glottal pitch as opposed to articulatory mechanisms, the relative difficulty of rising pitch, and the relative salience of tone in Mandarin.

Sociolinguists have investigated language mixing as code-switching in the speech of bilingual children three years old and older. Language mixing by bilingual two-year-olds, however, has generally been interpreted in the child language literature as a sign of the child's lack of language differentiation. The present study applies perspectives from sociolinguistics to investigate the language mixing of a bilingual two-year-old acquiring Norwegian and English simultaneously in Norway. Monthly recordings of the child's spontaneous speech in interactions with her parents were made from the age of 2;0 to 2;7. An investigation into the formal aspects of the child's mixing and the context of the mixing reveals that she does differentiate her language use in con-textually sensitive ways, hence that she can code-switch. This investigation stresses the need to examine more carefully the roles of dominance and context in the language mixing of young bilingual children.

Characterizing early communicative development in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is valuable for understanding profiles of ability in this population. The current investigation was modeled on Charman, Drew, Baird & Baird (2003b). Analyses explored parent report of early vocabulary, non-verbal communication, functional object use and play skills on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) in 93 children with ASD, 31 children with developmental delay (DD) and 29 typically developing children. Results were generally consistent with those of Charman and colleagues (2003b), suggesting that skills improve with increasing non-verbal mental age and chronological age but that most children with ASD are delayed in receptive and expressive vocabulary and non-verbal communication, functional object use and play skills. Vocabulary profiles in the ASD sample were similar to those in the comparison samples, as was the developmental pattern of gesture and vocabulary mastery. However, when compared to published norms, children with ASD may show less of a discrepancy between their receptive and expressive vocabulary.

Type/Token Ratios have been extensively used in child language research as an index of lexical diversity. This paper shows that the measure has frequently failed to discriminate between children at widely different stages of language development, and that the ratio may in fact fall as children get older. It is suggested here that such effects are caused by a negative, though non-linear, relationship between sample size (i.e. number of tokens) and Type/Token Ratio. Effects of open and closed class items are considered and an alternative Verbal Diversity measure is examined. Standardization of the number of tokens before computing Type/Token Ratios is recommended.

Nearly all theories of language development emphasize the importance of distributional cues for segregating words and phrases into syntactic categories like noun, feminine or verb phrase. However, questions concerning whether such cues can be used to the exclusion of referential cues have been debated. Using the headturn preference procedure, American children aged 1;5 were briefly familiarized with a partial Russian gender paradigm, with a subset of the paradigm members withheld. During test, infants listened on alternate trials to previously withheld grammatical items and ungrammatical items with incorrect gender markings on previously heard stems. Across three experiments, infants discriminated new grammatical from ungrammatical items, but like adults in previous studies, were only able to do so when a subset of familiarization items was double marked for gender category. The results suggest that learners can use distributional cues to category structure, to the exclusion of referential cues, from relatively early in the language learning process.

Although adult-based words co-occur in the period of transition to speech with a variety of non-word vocalizations, little attention has been given to the formidable problem of identifying these earliest words. This paper specifies explicit, maximally ‘inclusive’ identification procedures, with criteria based on both phonetic and contextual parameters. A formal system for evaluating phonetic match is suggested, as well as a set of child-derived functional categories reflecting use in context. Analysis of word use across two samples of 10 children each, followed from 0;9 to 1;4, provides evidence to suggest that context-bound words can be ‘trained’ by focusing on eliciting language, but that the timing of context-flexible word use remains independent of such training.

A cross-cultural investigation of the influence of target-language in babbling was carried out. 1047 vowels produced by twenty 10-month-old infants from Parisian French, London English, Hong Kong Cantonese and Algiers Arabic language backgrounds were recorded in the cities of origin and spectrally analysed. F1-F2 plots of these vowels were obtained for each subject and each language group. Statistical analyses provide evidence of differences between infants across language backgrounds. These differences parallel those found in adult speech in the corresponding languages. Implications of an early build-up of target-language-oriented production skills are discussed.

Mother–infant interactions were recorded for five dyads in a home environment. This report describes the vocalizations produced when the infants were 13 months old. Data are reported on syllable structure, phonetic properties of vowel-like and consonant-like segments, intonation contours and peak f0 values for individual syllables. In general, the acoustic–phonetic properties of the 13-month-olds' vocalizations were consistent with data reported in other studies for younger and older children. Hence, the results are seen as evidence for an overall continuity in early phonetic development.

Attempts to measure phonological acquisition have largely focused on segments, with less effort made to examine whole-word productions. This article proposes four measures designed to estimate a child's whole-word abilities: 1. the PHONOLOGICAL MEAN LENGTH OF UTTERANCE, a measure of whole-word complexity for both child and target words, 2. the PROPORTION OF WHOLE-WORD PROXIMITY, a measure of the proximity between the child's word and its target form, 3. the PROPORTION OF WHOLE-WORD CORRECTNESS, a measure of the number of words produced correctly relative to the sample size, and 4. the PROPORTION OF WHOLE-WORD VARIABILITY, a measure of how often a child produces words in distinct phonological shapes. The central measure is the Phonological Mean Length of Utterance, which can be used to identify a child's stage of acquisition, to assess proximity to target words, and to evaluate the complexity of words. The value of the new measures will be demonstrated through preliminary applications to a range of contexts; i.e. monolingual children acquiring English (five children, 0;11 to 1;5), Cantonese (one child, 1;7), and Spanish (5 children, 2;2 to 2;11), bilingual children acquiring Hungarian-English (one child, 2;0) and Spanish-English (3 children, 2;4 to 2;11), children with phonological impairment (eighteen children, 2;11 to 5;3), and children with cochlear implants (six children, 4;5 to 7;11).

Research undertaken to date suggests that important developments in the understanding and use of intonation may take place after the age of 5;0. The present study aims to provide a more comprehensive account of these developments. A specially designed battery of prosodic tasks was administered to four groups of thirty children, from London (U.K.), with mean ages of 5;6, 8;7, 10;10 and 13;9. The tasks tap comprehension and production of functional aspects of intonation, in four communicative areas: CHUNKING (i.e. prosodic phrasing), AFFECT, INTERACTION and FOCUS. Results indicate that there is considerable variability among children within each age band on most tasks. The ability to produce intonation functionally is largely established in five-year-olds, though some specific functional contrasts are not mastered until C.A. 8;7. Aspects of intonation comprehension continue to develop up to C.A. 10;10, correlating with measures of expressive and receptive language development.

Observations of early morning conversations between twin boys (2;9 at onset of research) indicate that young children are able to sustain a coherent dialogue over a number of turns. Contrary to the views of Piaget (1926), the interlocutors generally attend to one another's utterances. Coherence is achieved to a large extent by attending to the form of one another's utterances. Extended exchanges are maintained by speakers focusing on a sequence of sounds (sound play) or a constituent within an antecedent turn and reproducing it (with or without modification) in the next turn.

This study investigated young children's ability to use narrative contexts to infer the meanings of novel vocabulary items. Two groups of 15 seven- to eight-year olds participated: children with normally developing reading comprehension skill and children with weak reading comprehension skill. The children read short stories containing a novel word and were required to produce a meaning for the novel word, both before and after its useful defining context. The proximity of the novel word to this context was manipulated. The results supported the hypothesis that children with weak reading comprehension skills are impaired in their ability to integrate information within a text, particularly when that information is non-adjacent and the processing demands are, therefore, high. Analysis of the error data revealed a similar pattern of types of errors for both groups: children with poor reading comprehension were not more likely to produce a thematically inappropriate response than their skilled peers.

Longitudinal and cross-sectional designs were combined in this analysis of the evolution of children's capacity to represent deictic relationships. The longitudinal component contained the naturalistic observation of three relatively young children (1; 7–1; 9) and three somewhat older children (2; 0–2; 2). These children were tape-recorded in caretaker–child interactions. The analysis of the corpora from these children revealed: (1) imperfective activity verb phrases in the past tense, (2) telic verb phrases in the past tense used independently of resulting states, (3) moderately remote past references, and (4) deictic future references. The cross-sectional component contained an experiment in which elicitation procedures were used to obtain past and future references to atelic and telic situations. Nine 2½- and nine 3½-year-old children were tested. Generally high levels of performance reinforced the outcome of the longitudinal analysis.

There has been relatively little discussion in the field of child language acquisition about how best to sample from children's spontaneous speech, particularly with regard to quantitative issues. Here we provide quantitative information designed to help researchers make decisions about how best to sample children's speech for particular research questions (and/or how confident to be in existing analyses). We report theoretical analyses in which the major parameters are: (1) the frequency with which a phenomenon occurs in the real world, and (2) the temporal density with which a researcher samples the child's speech. We look at the influence of these two parameters in using spontaneous speech samples to estimate such things as: (a) the percentage of the real phenomenon actually captured, (b) the probability of capturing at least one target in any given sample, (c) the confidence we can have in estimating the frequency of occurrence of a target from a given sample, and (d) the estimated age of emergence of a target structure. In addition, we also report two empirical analyses of relatively infrequent child language phenomena, in which we sample in different ways from a relatively dense corpus (two children aged 2;0 to 3;0) and compare the different results obtained. Implications of these results for various issues in the study of child language acquisition are discussed.