Verbal and nonverbal components of pointing initiation by Down's Syndrome children when looking at books were studied. Analysis of initiation patterns and point duration revealed possible developmental progression from a stage where point and exchange duration are linked to a stage where pointing becomes more detached from the exchange. (21…

A study of the utterances of young children, aged 7 to 22 months, is described. These utterances, varying in length from one to 17 syllables, contain only suprasegmental information because the verbal content was incomprehensible to hearers who were not acquainted with the child and the situation in which the utterances occured. In the corpus,…

Using Locke's 1983 model, analyzes one tendency, consonant use in babbling and early words, and phonological word-selection patterns in 10 children, aged 8 to 16 months. Individual differences were found in all three domains analyzed, with some increase in uniformity across subjects with increasing knowledge of language. (Author/SED)

Discusses the use of stereotyped speech patterns as teaching material or as the basis of communicative exercises. Gives examples of the use of these gambits in drills and exercises in German. (EKN)

Purpose: Vocalization development has not been studied thoroughly in infants with early-identified hearing loss who receive hearing aids in the 1st year of life. This study sought to evaluate the relationship between auditory sensitivity and prelinguistic vocalization patterns in infants during the babbling stage. Method: Spontaneous…

Vowel production of a 14-month-old girl was studied over a 6-month period. Sixty percent of the vowels were produced correctly. A complex pattern of vowel preferences and errors was partially related to prespeech babbling preferences and strongly related to word structure variables (monosyllabic versus disyllabic). (Author/JDD)

Data on the development of fundamental frequency patterns and the emergence of semantic relations during the "one word period" in child language development are reported in this study. The research focuses on the changes that occur as children progress from producing single words to sequences of single words and finally to producing…

A study of the babbling and phonological development of 54 infants used half-hour videotape recordings of the children at play in their own homes. The vocal output was phonetically transcribed twice for interrater agreement, and analyzed for the consonants used five times or more in the child's vocal repertoire. These consonants were considered to…

Describes the transition from single to multiple word utterances in one child. The development illustrates the initial dissociation and later coordination of the temporal chaining of elements and meaning relatedness between elements and also the importance of repetition for the change from single-word utterances to meaning-related, multiword…

Examination of a two-year-old's early determiner-noun combinations suggested that early article use can be distributed across a variety of nouns, and that such usage does not seem appropriately characterized as a pattern of limited semantic scope. (CB)

This study discusses the nature of rhythm as it may apply to speech and language, reviews some of the literature on the development of rhythm, and presents some thoughts relating these findings to specific examples of children's speech. There is evidence to support the view that one need not look at the exact rhythm of any utterance, but only for…

A theoretical distinction is made between the growth of word meaning and the development of word sense in Vygotsky's terms. A recall from semantic memory task and the semantic differential were used to operationalize these two conceptions of meaning in a study of 72 children aged 5 to 10 years. Results replicated typical findings for the growth of…

A cues-pause-point procedure was used to train two severely retarded females to remain quiet before, during, and briefly after the presentation of questions and then to verbalize on the basis of environmental cues whose labels represented the correct responses. Echolalia was rapidly replaced by correct responding on the trained stimuli. (Author/JW)

Reports a study that compared the spelling performance of a 17-year-old developmental dysgraphic of normal intelligence to that of an acquired dysgraphic. Findings indicate that both make phonologically valid errors and spell regular words better than irregular words. These performances reflect a phonological routine corresponding to that used by…

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…