Two stages in the vocabulary development of two-year-olds are reported. In the earlier Receptive stage, the child says many fewer nouns than he understands and says no verbs at all although he understands many. The child then enters a Productive stage in which he says virtually all the nouns he understands plus his first verbs. (Author/DEP)

Young children's comprehension and overdiscrimination of natural language concepts were examined by asking 2- and 4-year-old children to select pictorial instances of five concrete semantic concepts. Results suggest that young children initially tend to use concept labels in a very restricted manner. (JMB)

Examines preschool children's comprehension of the differing implications of the verbs "think" and "know". Results indicated that 4-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, understood the differences between the terms. (JMB)

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

This article discusses an attempt to establish a model of the cognitive strategies used by a child in the acquisition of nouns and the stages in the process of categorizing reality. (Text is in Italian.) (CFM)

A classification and description of cry types stimulated by different internal sources--hunger, pain, illness and alarm. Various features of each type were distinguished by spectrographic analysis. Pain cries seemed to be the basic type from which other types evolve. Comparisons with other studies were made. (AMH)

The pronunciation of stop consonants in consonant-vowel-consonant words by 45 preschool children (15 with speech disorders) was evaluated. In the speech-disordered group, errors in initial position differed from those in final position. Voicing errors occurred most frequently in initial position, and glottal stop realizations in final position.…

Describes a study that examines the ability of children to identify given/new elements in passive and cleft forms in order to ascertain the relationship between syntactic and pragmatic acquisition. Results indicate that complete competence with these marked sentence forms does not occur universally until some time in adolescence. (SED)

Presents a brief theoretical statement on definition and then discusses a study of the development of definition in children aged 5 to 10. The development of definition is characterized as the gradual articulation of a conventional definitional form out of more general forms of ordinary oral discourse. (NCR)

Children ages 1 1/2 to 3 years were tested to determine their comprehension of the terms "in,""on," and "under." It was found that children who listened to a pretest story involving the objects to be used in the study showed markedly better comprehension of the terms than children not exposed to the pretest activity.…

Investigates language-normal one-year-olds' (N=14) and language-impaired two- and three-year-olds' (N=10) acquisition of words referring to three types of action. Findings revealed that, although both groups produced few of the words, the language-normal subjects comprehended the different types of action, whereas the impaired subjects did not.…

Considers children's understanding and use of contrast in language, including discussion of the role contrast plays in adult speech, the kinds of contrast commonly exemplified, and possible tests for sameness or difference of meaning. (CB)

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)

Examines the relationship between children's attribute saliency and metaphor interpretation. Findings indicate that attribute saliency for the individual perceiving the metaphor plays a key role in the interpretation process. (Author/CB)