This article suggests a possible link between incipient stuttering and early difficulty in language formulation. The hypothesis offers a unifying explanation of an array of empirical observations. Among these observations are the following: early stuttering occurs only on the first word of a syntactic structure; stuttering does not appear to be…

This study assessed the relation between mother mental state language and child desire language and emotion understanding in 15--24-month-olds. At both times point, mothers described pictures to their infants and mother talk was coded for mental and nonmental state language. Children were administered 2 emotion understanding tasks and their mental…

A language and literacy intervention was implemented in 10 Head Start classrooms. Teachers were trained in specific book reading and conversation strategies. The focus of the intervention was to train teachers how to increase opportunities for language and vocabulary development in young children. At the end of the year, children in the…

Data from child language comprehension show that children make errors in interpreting pronouns as late as age 6;6 yet correctly comprehend reflexives from the age of 3;0. On the other hand, data from child language production show that children correctly produce both pronouns and reflexives from the age of 2 or 3. Current explanations of this…

Four recent volumes on acquisition of French by different populations cover a range of areas, particularly the development of verbal tense/agreement and nominal gender/concord in first language (L1) acquirers, as opposed to second language (L2) learners; the generalizability of grammatical deficits (e.g. difficulty acquiring parametrized features…

A study investigated whether imitation plays a significant role in the acquisition of grammar. Three 6- to 8-year-old hearing-impaired children were administered the Grammatical Analysis of Elicited Language--Simple Sentence Level Test (GAEL), which is designed to evaluate hearing-impaired children's use of grammatical aspects of spoken and/or…

A study of infant language acquisition investigated the possibility that perceptual or attentional tendencies may guide early word learning by directing infants' attention in linguistically relevant ways. In the experiment, infants aged 9 to 13 months watched a puppet show; with some children, sentences labeling either the objects (noun-frame…

Word and nonword vocalizations produced by two groups of children aged 8-28 months were studied. The first group included six children whose speech was recorded monthly for 12 months. The second group contained 21 children. In both, only spontaneous vocalizations were recorded. Each sample was examined for frequency of word and nonword forms. A…

The relationship between the realization of the argument-structure of a verb and its acquisition as a lexical item was investigated in a case study. The subject was a girl aged 2.3 years whose father was a native English-speaker and whose mother was a native Japanese speaker who also spoke English. The child had been born in the United States but…

Tests were given to a nine-year-old boy to establish the constraints operating when he was writing poetry. The tests involved writing cloze tests on poems by poet Ted Hughes and on a poem the boy had written a year earlier. The boy was also asked to write a poem and then to discuss what he was thinking as he wrote. The following constraints were…

A study is described, the results of which indicate that mothers can recognize the cries of their own infants from tape-recorded cry samples with few instances of confusion, and that the sex of an unknown infant cannot be reliably identified using a simple auditory identification paradigm. (Author/RM)

Brief reports are presented on several doctoral research projects on language acquisition. These projects concern such topics as: the linguistic expression of causal relations; language development of hearing children of deaf parents; bidialectal skills of black children; and language acquisition among Kaluli Children in New Guinea. (SW)

An eclectic language arts program which stresses the use of personal experiences in developing language abilities may be the best approach to the development of self identity. (JH)

This study examined interaction between non-referential gesture and discourse-structuring linguistic devices in the development of metanarrative ability. Specifically, the development of the interaction between beat gestures and all metanarrative devices was analyzed in 9 children aged 5-6, 8-9, 11-12, and in 3 adults. Subjects viewed a cartoon…