Presents a simple scheme, based on formal categories, for coding stylistic variation in the early lexicon. When applied to the first 50 and 100 words of 12 children between 0;11 and 2;3, the major dimensions of difference are found to be the relative proportion of common nouns and the relative proportion of frozen phrases. (31 references) (GLR)

A child with chronic otitis media with effusion solved the problem of reduced and fluctuating auditory input with phonological selection and avoidance strategies that capitalized on prosodic cues. Findings illustrate the need to consider interactions among performance, input, and linguistic constraints to explain individual variation in language…