Analysis of the communicative skills of a nine-year-old deaf boy with minimal schooling showed pantomiming and gestures to be his major mode of communication. Certain semantic patterns prevailed. Use of left or right hand also had semantic correlates. Formal and idiosynacratic signs were discovered in the boy's vocabulary. (Author/PJM)

Studies of (TD) and (ING) in King of Prussia (Pennsylvania) families show that children have matched their parents' patterns of variation by age seven, before many categorical phonological and grammatical rules can be established. Some dialect-specific and socially marked constraints are acquired before constraints with general articulatory…

Refutes the reanalysis of a phonologically disordered child's use of fricatives as developed by Fey (1989) within a relational framework. Evidence in the form of nonsystematic correspondence between the child's substitution patterns and the target sound system is used to further establish accuracy of the original independent generative analysis…

Examines the phonetic patterns and linguistic development of an infant who was tracheostomized during the period that infants normally begin to produce syllabic vocalization. It was found that the infant had developed only a tenth of the canonical syllables expected in normally developing infants, a small inventory of consonant-like segments, and…

Analysis of a complete set of word-forms produced by a one-year-old at the one-word stage found that the data showed little phonetic variability and that phonological development during the period studied (about one year) was qualitatively continuous with subsequent development. (Author/CB)

A longitudinal study examined two-year-olds' acquisition of the English auxiliary system after a six-week exposure to additional auxiliary input in varying sentence contexts. Results indicated that subjects did not significantly differ from a baseline group that did not receive additional input. (Author/CB)

Investigated the first verbs to participate in verb-object and subject-verb-object combinations and the temporal parameters of the spread of these combinations over different verbs, observing longitudinally young children acquiring English and Hebrew. Results indicated that the more verbs children already knew to combine in a certain pattern, the…

A phonological and syntactic study of a small important group of nonarbitrary terms in Pomo baby talk that are concerned with elemental body needs. A progression is shown from sound images closely associated with the action state or object denoted to the phonological patterns of adult languages. (SCC)

This article discusses the relationship between the linguistic description of language and the speaker's acquisition and use of language, with specific reference to the role of paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships in the acquisition of definition as a linguistic behavior. (Text is in French.) (AM)

The acquisition of morpheme-structure constraints by children is discussed. The focus is a subset of verbs in modern Hebrew and the language-specific knowledge that children acquire of what constitutes a possible verb in their language, from the point of view of both internal form and of categorical appropriateness for naming a certain semantic…

There is overwhelming evidence that children's first words are primarily nouns even across languages. These data are interpreted as evidence of a "Natural Partitions Theory," one that holds that the concepts referred to by nouns are conceptually more basic than those referred to by verbs or prepositions. Analysis of data from…

A speech act approach to the transition from pre-linguistic to linguistic communication is adopted in order to consider language in relation to behavior and to allow for an emphasis on the use, rather than the form, of language. A pilot study of mothers and infants is discussed. (Author/RM)

This study examines the relative contributions of rote-memorization, analogic formation and rule-operation in the production of plurals. Rule-operation was found to be important in that children producing responses characteristic of a given stage did not produce responses for later stages. Contributions of analogic formation and rote-memorization…

Two experiments were conducted to determine whether children, ages 4-7 assign invariant labels to objects or describe the objects in terms of the context of alternatives. The acquisition of adjective ordering rules and information limits on children's utterances were also examined. (JMB)