Purpose: Verbal short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM) skills predict speech and language outcomes in children with cochlear implants (CIs) even after conventional demographic, device, and medical factors are taken into account. However, prior research has focused on single end point outcomes as opposed to the longitudinal process of…

For the two children studied and in the situations observed and recorded, important conditions for the emergence of language in the ontogeny of communication appear to be: (1) interaction with caretaking adults, (2) shared focal attention, and (3) specificity of reference. (Author)

French-speaking children and adults heard silent comic-strip stories that differed by frame display mode, explicitness of the links between depicted events, and whether the topic changed on the last frame. Subjects' use of referents for the last frame indicated that manipulation of context was a good means of assessing speakers' acquisition of…