This discussion argues that the development of children's definitions is shaped by a particular orientation to word meaning characteristic of literate language use. This orientation is marked by increased attention to the linguistic form of expressions. To test this argument, a study was undertaken in which eight common nouns, familiar to most…

Story retelling is suggested as a method to evaluate children's ability to comprehend, organize, and express language. (MKM)

Analysis of a one-year-old's speech in two different speech contexts (dialogue vs. crib-monologue) yielded striking patterns of co-occurrences involving verb morphology and forms of self-reference. (Author/CB)

Examines the age at which and the form in which children produce speech acts which commit them to a future action. Results revealed that all of the four- to 11-year-olds produced directive speech acts, but only the older children used the explicit performative verb "promise" to reassure the hearer of their commitment. (Author/CB)

Describes a study of the use of the terms "will" and "gonna" in the speech of two three-year-old girls. The results suggest that one of the functions of "will" and "gonna" is to impart different causal relations to the two practices of "undertaking" and "planning." (HTH)

Reviews the concept that the melodic features of language play a major role in a child's acquisition of both oral and book language. (FL)

In this study, maternal speech was analyzed acoustically to see whether mothers spoke with the same simplitude in both real and play situations. Results showed that mothers use both pitch height and pitch range to introduce the preverbal infant to the difference between play and nonplay situations. (Author/JL)

Analysis of speech samples from British female adults (N=8) revealed that the subjects increased vocal pitch when addressing young children, but not as much as previously studied North American subjects did. Pitch increases were more commonly observed in free speech than in reading-aloud conditions. (23 references) (Author/CB)

Three- to nine-year-olds' (N=80) post-exposure production of regular and irregular suffixes indicated that subjects found it easier to learn a regular suffix when they heard it used with phonetically similar base forms. Subjects were more likely to overgeneralize the regular suffix to irregular forms when they had heard it used in conjunction with…

Investigated the use of "mama" or similar sounds referred to as "mama" by 75 infants less than 6 months of age. Parents were directed to listen for "mama" sounds and to note the sounds made, the age of onset, whether the sounds appeared to be directed to any person or persons, or whether they appeared to have a purpose. (Author/VWL)

Objectives: To determine whether oral language, working memory, and social anxiety differentiate children with selective mutism (SM), children with anxiety disorders (ANX), and normal controls (NCs) and explore predictors of mutism severity. Method: Children ages 6 to 10 years with SM (n = 44) were compared with children with ANX (n = 28) and NCs…

Reviews the literature concerning the importance of a child's oral language in learning to read. (JM)

Analyzes data regarding children's early talk about past experiences, resulting from longitudinal home observations of five working-class mothers and their two-year-olds. Results indicate that children talked primarily of negative past events, especially those involving physical harm, and that during this period temporally-ordered sequences…

Describe studies in which day-long recordings were made of nine-year-old children's spontaneous speech. Results indicate that: (1) children aged five to 15 speak some 20,000 words of discourse per day in about two to three hours of pure speaking time; (2) they have an active vocabulary of some 3,000 word-form types. (SED)

People explore their world in many ways: they observe, they read, they ponder, they write, they listen. They also turn to others and intentionally engage them in their own attempts to understand. It is this turning-to-others that is the focus of this book, with reference to children. An act of inquiry is defined in the book as "a language act…