Theories of the acquisition of word meaning among children are reviewed and a case study of one child is reported. Three models of how the young child associates words with underlying concepts and conventional meanings are noted. While one model proposes that children initially overextend word meanings, the other two models propose that new words…

Verb nominalization in Navajo is a strategy by which children create category labels when the adult lexical item is not known; it allows for the creation of uniquely descriptive category labels. This study was based on a series of interviews with Navajo children aged four-and-a-half to approximately ten years, all native speakers of Navajo with…

Twelve pairs of three-year-olds and twelve pairs of five-year-olds were monitored in a play situation; their transcribed speech was examined for use of nominal reference, with attention to pronominalization and ellipsis. For the corpus of nominal references, there was a clear trend toward normal progression from specific indefinite to definite to…

This manual is designed to help parents facilitate their children's language development. It is divided into five sections based on different levels of language development that extend from children's early use of sounds to their production of four and five word sentences. Each section contains a brief general description of children's speech and…

A range of language use model is proposed as an alternative conceptual framework to a stage model of egocentric speech. The range of language use model is proposed to clarify the meaning of the term egocentric speech, to examine the validity of stage assumptions, and to explain the existence of contextual variation in the form of children's…

One English speaking child's phonological, semantic, and syntactical development from 15 to 21 months old is detailed in order to investigate the development of the mid vowel categories in English as reflected in spontaneous speech production. Prior research on this topic is summarized to reveal certain trends in the development of mid vowels.…

The speech of three girls aged 17 to 19 months was recorded in three at-home sessions. Patterns of single-word and multiple-word utterances were different for each of the three girls. This difference seems to support the notion that the most interaction-oriented child has, at least in terms of the word classes upon which she bases her…

Children with a mean age of 2;10 were presented with three tasks designed to evaluate their concept of front-back orientation. Two of the tasks were non-linguistic (a parade task and a canonical encounter task, involving nine toy objects). A third linguistic task assessed the child's knowledge of "front" and "back" by asking him/her to point to…

Seven children aged 21 to 33 months were taped while they interacted with adults. Transcripts of each session were examined for utterances containing "and,""because,""but,""then," and "so.""And" was the first conjunction produced by all children, followed by "because.""So" was the last conjunction produced, and was used to mean both "in order…

The meaning of children's lexical innovations is distinguished from the forms they rely on to convey meaning. Children require knowledge of the context in order to judge how the meaning of their innovation can be conveyed to the addressee. This contextualization is often achieved by default, since children tend to limit their early conversations…

This paper concerns the acquisition of the English liquids 1 and r by one boy, Daniel, between August 1968 and March 1970, from the age of 1 year 6 months to 3 years 1 month. This study follows the model proposed in Stampe's "The Acquisition of Phonetic Representation," in which the child's pronunciation is derived from his mental representation…

Children's cognizance of linguistic selectional rules was studied in a controlled sentence production task. Forty-five third grade and 45 sixth grade children wrote noun responses in active and passive sentence frames in which only verbs and function words were given. The verbs varied in how animate nouns were required as both logical subjects and…

A child acquiring a language must learn to correctly match the phenomena of the realworld which he perceives with the lexical items and the segregates and perhaps some of the grammatical categories of the language to be learned. He must correlatively learn the organization in meaning of and among these last named elements, that is, the internal…

Reports on an experiment, conducted on ten children who misarticulated /s/, and designed to survey the effect of consonant context on misarticulation. Suggests that a context-sensitive model of phonetic performance is needed to account for variation in correct /s/ production. (Author/AM)

Examines children's strategies in language production. Focuses on how children in early stages of language acquisition talk about objects, spatial relations, and actions, and the extent to which they rely on general purpose terms in all three domains. (JMB)