An investigation focuses on the portion of preschool verbal action that could be considered successful dialogue. Ten dyads of four-year olds were videotaped during freeplay, where segments of talk were identified as dialogue or nondialogue. (35 References) (JL)

Describes the Human Communication Research Centre Dialogue Database. The database consists of over 700 transcribed and coded dialogues from pairs of speakers aged from 7-14. The speakers are recorded over 2 years while tackling cooperative problem-solving tasks, and the same pairs of speakers are recorded over 2 years tackling 10 different…

From the beginning of life, a child's acts of meaning are joint constructions, enacted through dialogue between himself and a significant other by reference to whom he is achieving a personal identity. When the child begins to control his material environment, he begins the transition to systematic symbolic construction. At the same time, he is…

Describes two types of feedback (explicit and implicit) in the responses of four mothers to their two-year-old children and investigates whether these mothers respond differentiallly to their children's well-formed and ill-formed utterances with either type of feedback. Results demonstrate that a high proportion of maternal responses qualify as…

Focuses on the narrative function to show how children can build on another speaker's turns in conversation and can build on their own utterances as they speak. Analyzes children's dialogs and narratives to highlight the primacy of the oral language arts as they are enacted in daily conversation and play. (HTH)

This paper investigates the development of interactive communication skills in 170 children aged 7 to 13. Results indicate that the development of interactive communication skills is rather different from the process of language acquisition both in the extended timescale involved and in the considerable variability exhibited by speakers of…

This study compared different strategies (questions, comments, reformulations, and repetitions) used by an adult in dialogue with 17 language impaired and 24 control preschool children. Two types of co-production (a tale and a personal account) were analyzed. The stability of the distribution of the various strategies in both situations is seen as…

Articles on communication and language disorder are presented. All but one are in French; the other is in German. They include: "Specificity of Developmental Dysphasia: Implications for Intervention" (Marc Montfort, Adoracion Juarez Sanchez); "Difficulties with Language Development and Discursive Capacity" (Genevieve de Weck); "Language Production…