The research reported here was carried out to help establish the normal course of fricative acquisition as a basis for comparisons with abnormal development. Three questions concerning phonological processes were investigated as part of a larger study of fricative acquisition: (1) the phonological processes that underlie children's fricative…

Sound play is important to child language development in that it contributes to the phonetic substrate, it is a factor in phonological development, and it is something to be learned as part of the socially acceptable use of language. Sound play progresses in three stages: (1) babbling, in which a gradual acquisition of phonetic units is built up…

This study investigated the role of gesture in communication development. Gestural categories, based on communicative function, were identified from longitudinal videotapes of one mother-child pair. The videotapes were made weekly or bi-weekly from the time the child was 13 months of age until she was 42 months of age. The results of the study…

This paper reports on a longitudinal study of the acquisition of the voicing contrast in English word-initial stop consonants, as measured by voice onset time. Four monolingual children were recorded at two week intervals, beginning when the children were about 1;6. Data provided evidence for three general stages: (1) the child has no contrast;…

This paper studies aspects of the conceptual basis for language acquisition, with a focus on the perceptual-cognitive skills used to assign meanings to words. A first assumption is that the correspondence between adult and child perceptual features allows for early communication. Apparently, in the first year, naming is characterized by…

Concerned with educational problems associated with low socioeconomic status, this pilot study in linguistic ecology was designed to substitute hard data for speculation about the nature and frequency of verbal behavior in the world of the poor child. To avoid self-consciousness and any restrictions on movement of the subjects, a small…

A linguistic analysis of five children's books, randomly selected from the "Modern Masters Books for Children" series, described the features of language found in books for beginning readers and demonstrated the value of structural analysis in reading research. Four linguistic measures were applied to each book: 1) the average number of words in a…

The study reports quasilongitudinal data on 10 children at 2:0 and 2:5, and another 10 children at 2:9 and 3:3. The analysis included word-initial and word-final phonetic inventories of consonant singletons and clusters and a summary of the relative frequency of seven word shapes. (Author/JDD)

Reports on data collected in nine age ranges from 18 months to 71 months that examined children's ability to understand emotion-descriptive adjectives when used by adults and their own use of these words in productive vocabulary. (HOD)

Two linguistically deficient children of deaf parents had been cared for almost exclusively by their mother, who did not speak or sign to them. Intervention led to erasure of idiosynchratic speech pattern in the older child and in increasing both children's expressive ability. Implications for language-learning are discussed. (PJM)

The speech children spontaneously quote was examined in 2 studies involving personal narratives from 96 children aged 4 to 9 and speech in 25 children aged 1 to 5. Findings showed that frequency of reported speech increased with age and direct quotation was more common than indirect or summarized quotations at all ages. (57 references) (Author/LB)

Examined overregularization of irregular verb forms in children's language learning. Found that overregularization errors are relatively rare; occur at a constant rate; and are not correlated with the proportion of regular verbs in parents' or children's speech. Also found that a period of correct performance precedes the child's first error. (BC)

Focusing on language development--from beginning speech to literacy--with particular attention paid to growth in writing, this paper identifies and describes: (1) links between speech and writing; and (2) features of children's written and spoken texts that indicate growth. The process of constructing "texts" is presented as the fabric…

A question of both theoretical and practical importance for the study of phonological development is whether there is a difference in the status of productions rendered spontaneously by the child and those repeated by the child after either an adult model or his own production. The relevant theoretical questions are: (1) Are all the child's…