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)

Luo-speaking children in Kenya responded to a test using nonce forms in morphophonology. Morphophonological processes in the acquisition of Luo plurals and possessives presented different degrees of difficulty for the subjects, with the type of morphophonological alteration in a language likely to affect the rate and order of acquisition.…

Investigated whether the content of infant speech productions is better characterized as preserving stressed and final syllables or as preserving a trochaic pattern; used a detailed longitudinal description of one child's syllable omission. Found that the trochaic template hypothesis was not supported by these early productions. (Author/JPB)

Research and theory on language acquisition and language socialization are examined and compared. The language acquisition perspective is that the central question is how children acquire forms and patterns of language, with syntax at the core, so early and so rapidly. From the viewpoint of language socialization, the issue is not only of…

The early acquisition of the interrogative system, with data from Serbo-Croatian, is investigated. The subject is approached from the angle of adult-child interaction. A first-born pair of dizygotic twins were observed, beginning a month prior to the time when they first began to produce questions. (Author/RM)

Adult "redoing" sequences (expansions and repeats) in conversations between adult and child (age 1;6) are analyzed with a conversational analytic approach, and two ways in which redoing sequences are involved in the initiation of repair are explored. It is proposed that a redoing sequence picks up a child's utterance and displays it for some kind…

Outside the core grammar, the set of "peripheral" or marked properties of a language include exceptions or relaxations of the settings of core grammar and the idiosyncratic features of the language governed by particular lexical items. The core/peripheral distinction has direct implications for grammatical development in children. The…

A study examined the consistency of consonant use in the infant's transition period from babbling to early words. Phonetic data were collected from the speech of 10 infants aged 9 to 15 months. Analysis of consonant distribution patterns indicate striking segmental preferences in all 10 children, with some segments more prominent for the sample as…

This paper presents a study of metalinguistic awareness in young children. Metalinguistic awareness refers to the child's ability to concentrate on the sounds and patterns of language rather than on its communicative aspects. Metalinguistic awareness was studied by analyzing the verbal play and verbal games of 149 children from 6 months to 10…

This paper examines aspects of variation in child language, and specifically how children express causal relations in complex sentences. Four particular types of variation were observed: (1) the order of clauses and the connectives used to link clauses; (2) mothers' causal statements; (3) interaction of language form and content, in the form of…

A detailed error analysis was performed on spontaneous and elicited speech samples of Anglo second graders learning Spanish. The results tended to disconfirm the L to the subpower of 1 = L to the subpower of 2 hypothesis that first and second language acquisition follow identical patterns. However, evidence suggests that genuine similarities do…

The silence between two people's utterances during conversation is referred to as a juncture pause and the outcome of events at the juncture pause determines who will speak next in a conversation. A study explored the nature of interruptions in young children's conversation and examined whether turn-taking repair occurred after an interruption and…

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…

This master's thesis focuses on the relationship between children's development of communicative competence and patterns of communication between children and their primary caregivers. An overview of major changes, since the 1950s, in the theoretical and empirical approaches to language development is presented in Chapter II. Within this overview,…