The study characterized the terms used by 144 children, ages 3-8, to describe sexual body parts. Older children had more accurate terminology than younger children. The gender of the child or interviewer had little influence on child responses. (Author/DB)

Examines speech samples from six children aged 2 years to 2 years, 5 months, with Mean Lengths of Utterance ranging from 2.93 to 4.14, were examined for evidence of six syntactic categories: determiner, adjective, noun, noun phrase, preposition, and prepositional phrase. (HOD)

Evaluates the effects of presenting verbal models following the initiations or expressions of interest of 16 children aged 28 to 34 months on both production and comprehension abilities measures. Results suggest that the timing of exposure to language models plays a critical role in language acquisition. (RJC)

The use of deictic words from 5 classes by 4 preschool teachers and 12 children with hearing losses was examined. Teachers used a total of 648 deictic words versus the children's 172 examples. Personal pronouns were the most frequently used class, followed by demonstrative pronouns, adverbs of location, shifting reference verbs, and adverbs of…

This article evaluates the "Frames, then Content" hypothesis for speech acquisition, which sees babbling as a direct result of producing syllabic "frames" by rhythmic mandibular oscillation with little of the "content" seen under mandible-independent control. Analysis of 6,659 utterances of 6 normally developing…

Designed to grade children's knowledge of commonly used instructional terms in a particular language arts program, the AIT consists of a verbal part and a situational part. Each part assesses the same commonly used instructional terms: word, begin, letter, name, makes sense, beginning sounds, print, trace, capital letter, rhyme, period, stands…

An investigation was made of the role of parents in children's acquisition of pragmatic language skills (in other words, their ability to use language appropriately in social contexts). A total of 49 middle class adults completed questionnaires; 9 were parents, 15 were teachers, 9 were both teachers and parents, and 16 were neither. The first part…

This bibliographic review aims to present a single comprehensive source of references to facilitate clinical application of data obtained on the vocal activity of normal infants and to facilitate continued research on prelinguistic vocal output. The bibliography cites the published observational, empirical, and theoretical reports that examine the…

Pointing gestures of verbally advanced two-year-olds were contrasted with those of less advanced peers to examine the relationships of gesture to language during the acquisition of each. Formal and functional aspects of each communicative skill were measured. Gesture and language corresponded only in their functional aspects. (Author/AS)

Combinatorial abilities in language and elicited symbolic play were compared in a longitudinal study of 30 children at 20 and 28 months. In addition, multivariate analyses were used to assess the stability of individual differences. Generally, different symbolic play variables contributed unique explained variance to different language variables.…

The continuity in development of syllable duration patterns was examined in seven young children as they progressed from preword to multiword periods of vocalization development. Results revealed no systematic increase or decrease in the duration of bisyllables produced by the children as a group, whereas lengthening of final syllables was…

Conversational samples of 10 dyads of 4-year-old children during play were analyzed. All dyads evidenced some lengthy topics (13-91 utterances), characterized by 3 text-level functions: enacting scenarios, describing, and problem solving. Three-fourths of all dialogues were considered relatively short. (Author/JDD)

Fundamental frequency, duration, and amplitude measures were extracted from stressed and unstressed syllables in interword and intraword comparisons. Analysis of target stress patterns revealed no difference between acoustic marking of stress by 6 adults and 22 toddlers. Findings indicate that children generally control these variables to derive…

This study examined the influence of metrical patterns (syllable stress and serial position) of words on the production accuracy of 20 children (ages 22 months to 28 months). Among results were that one-fourth of the initial unstressed syllables were omitted and that consonant omissions, though few, tended to occur in the initial position.…

Utterances from stuttering and normally speaking children, aged two through four years, were analyzed by clinicians specializing in stuttering, general clinicians, and university students (total n=25). Results indicated that the validity of the data language used by researchers to describe stuttered and normal speech in early childhood may be…