The first stage of combinatorial speech is better described as variable than uniform. Talk of variants obscures two different aspects of language (knowledge and use) and two different aspects of language development -- acquisition of the grammar (competence) and deployment of the grammar in speaking and listening (performance). Null subjects and…

Many Aboriginal Australian communities are undergoing language shift from traditional Indigenous languages to contact varieties such as Kriol, an English-lexified Creole. Kriol is reportedly characterised by lexical items with highly variable phonological specifications, and variable implementation of voicing and manner contrasts in obstruents…

Linguistic input in multi-lingual/-cultural contexts is highly variable. We examined the production of English and Malay laterals by fourteen early bilingual preschoolers in Singapore who were exposed to several allophones of coda laterals: Malay caregivers use predominantly clear-l in English and Malay, but their English coda laterals can also be…

This study analyses variation sets in a sample of child-directed speech (CDS) in Turkish in terms of their structure and effect on child speech. The term "variation set" was first introduced to describe the sequences of repetitions, in which the intention behind expressions stays the same throughout the whole conversation while the form…

Research on sources of individual difference in parental Infant-Directed Speech (IDS) is limited and there is a particular lack of research on fathers' compared to mothers' speech. This study examined the predictive relations between infant characteristics and variability in paternal lexical diversity (LD) in dyadic free play with two-year-olds (M…

Child speech is highly variable. The speech apparatus--the vocal tract, tongue, teeth, and vocal folds--develop at different rates for different children, which helps explain some of the variability in children's speech. For example, the ratio of the oral to pharyngeal cavities changes as children age, making it difficult to establish reliable…

The article by Amaral and Roeper (this issue; henceforth A&R) presents many interesting ideas about first and second language acquisition as well as some experimental data convincingly illustrating the difference between production and comprehension. The article extends the concept of Universal Bilingualism proposed in Roeper (1999) to second…

Linguists use the concept of "diglossia" to describe any sociolinguistic situation where a low-prestige dialect coexists with a high-prestige one and these dialects are used in different social spheres. Recent observations on Reunion Island have challenged this view because people mix French and Creole extensively in the same utterance…

The study tested the effect of three factors on Arab children's (N = 256) phoneme isolation: "phoneme's linguistic affiliation" (standard phonemes vs. spoken phonemes), phoneme position (initial vs. final), and linguistic context (singleton vs. cluster). Two groups of children speaking two different vernaculars were tested. The two vernaculars…

The frequencies and co-occurrence distributions of some of the prosodic features in the speech of children are discussed. The emphasis is on the determination of systems and structure of non-segmental lectal variability in the children's speech without primary reference to function. The primary data consisted of selected episodes of connected…

According to the theory of Universal Grammar, the primary linguistic data guides children through an innately specified space of hypotheses. On this view, similarities between child-English and adult-German are as unsurprising as similarities between cousins who have never met. By contrast, experience-based approaches to language acquisition…

A description of a study whose object was to analyze the oral language used in class by nine-year-olds from varied socioeconomic backgrounds. The procedure, results and the linguistic characteristics according to situation are described. Several statistical tables are provided. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

The purpose of the study reported in this document was to examine the oral language and some of the influences on oral language of students from five to nine years old. Six students in each of 13 classes were selected randomly and were taped in three different situations: a monologue by the student when alone in the room, a dialogue with another…

This study investigated the linguistic characteristics of speech addressed to the child and the features of the verbal environment critical for learning language. The study focused on the prosodic and paralinguistic features of adult speech to the young child. Adult speech directed to children was compared to other kinds of systematic speech…

Focuses on arguments among White American children in a small town in New England, Black American children of migrant harvesters, and rural Hindi-speaking Fiji Indian children. Findings suggest that, while repetition, inversion, and escalation are common to all three cultures, there is considerable variation as to how they are used. (EJS)