Children in grades 1-3 were asked to retell and explain a series of riddles. Ability to recall riddles was not predictive of ability to explain them. Three cognitive factors seemed to determine level of riddle competence. Implications concern the relationship of riddle competence to reading ability and metalinguistic facility. (CHK)

This study of final-consonant repetitions in the speech of a young child supports the notion that some speech disfluencies may result from parental attempts to accelerate phonological development. An analysis of 12 half-hour-long observations over a year is presented and discussed in terms of the home environment. (Author/KM)

The relationship between speech perception and speech production was investigated, by comparing five six and seven-year-old Dutch children who misarticulated the final consonant cluster /-ts/ with three control groups. Results indicate that the poorer the articulation proficiency of a group, the more variability there was in both production and…

Children who learn to speak at an early age have mothers whose basic mode of disciplining is verbal. Charts; bibliography. (AF)

Reports on an experiment describing the lexical development of a hearing child with a deaf mother and hearing father. Data confirm previous findings that (1) sign emerges before spoken word, (2) acquisition stages are similar in ASL and spoken English, and (3) the child initially develops one lexical system. (Author/AM)

Six preschool children, mostly from poverty-level backgrounds, were taught to make descriptive statements about objects. The category-descriptor statements were organized and sequenced into four clusters. As sets of new statements were successively taught and evaluated, the number and diversity of probed category and descriptor terms steadily and…

This study examined the effects of maternal directive and nondirective styles of interaction on the emergence of verbal communicative intent in toddlers, and sought to understand the association between maternal interaction styles and young children's pragmatic acquisition. During free play, maternal utterances of 12 mother-child dyads, with…

A 20-minute videotape sample was obtained of the language interactions between 20 Down syndrome children (ages 38 to 107 months) and their mothers during informal playtime. Linguistic utterances of mothers and children were coded according to the following language categories: query, declarative, imperative, performative, feedback, imitation,…

Discourse and conversational analysis methods were used in a qualitative reconstruction of one aspect of the regularities in the way 61 children "do" personal reference. Of particular interest was the development of two reference forms: minimization--preference for simple (one word) forms, or recipient design--reference forms indicating…

Language research over the past two decades has revealed that language is not something children "acquire," but rather a system they build. A key factor in this linguistic construction is children's interaction with parents or other caregivers. The studies reveal further that children's repeated interactions with books and stories and…

Imitation in the speech of the child serves at least three functions in the development of linguistic competence. Imitation provides auditory feedback for phonological and morpho-syntactic accuracy, produces a model for verification and/or clarification by speakers, and "makes time" for the processing and acquisition of information. Beyond these…

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…

Data are presented from one subject (J) that show a gradual development of the complexity of words in terms of syllable structure and degree of phonetic similarity of co-occurring consonants. During the age range of 1;9 to 2;6, J's data show a highly systematic progression of stages, each characterized by fewer restrictions on the number, order,…

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…

The first part of this bibliography contains annotations of articles on the acquisition of voice onset time (VOT) as the marker of a phonological contrast, that is, the studies concern children who are already developing a phonological system. The most common questions are the following: (1) When children begin to produce initial stops, how are…