A detailed analysis of a six-month period in a child's acquisition of phonetic and phonological capacities indicates that the apparent plateau of the second year is a site of intensive language learning, which is not reflected in the growth of vocabulary or mean length of utterance. (Author/EJS)

Looks at phonological development in lexical terms and extends the method of Ferguson and Farwell to consideration of syllables within words. The research is directed toward the question of whether children acqure a sound system by following "universal" orders of acquistion or by developing distinct strategies. (EJS)

The purpose of the paper was to map the language development of children at infant school and examine spontaneous corrections made by the children of their speech. (Author/NCR)

Language delayed children need systematic instruction, experience with a range of language functions, and opportunities for spontaneous speech. (DD)

Discusses the possibility of a neurolinguistic interconnection between the parieto-temporo-occipital junction, semantic aphasis, and cognitive and language development around age seven. (Author/HP)

Describes Joan Tough's research into the uses of language by middle-class mothers and their children in English society and presents the classification system for child language developed by Tough. (DD)

Describes the Milwaukee Multimedia Home Education Project, which helps parents assist preschool children to acquire learning and language skills. (DD)

The simultaneous acquisition of Italian and English by a child living in Italy, the son of an American mother and Italian father, is discussed by his mother. In particular, the development of his vocabulary is analyzed. (Text is in Italian.) (CFM)

Compares data gathered for 5-year-olds in Montreal and Paris, and shows that the differences between the two communities are marginal in terms of the complexity of the acquisition process. Notable differences are observed in performance. (Text is in French.) (CDSH/CLK)

This monograph presents a descriptive analysis of the syntactic patterns in 16 corpora of word combinations from 11 infants learning either English (six children), Samoan, Finnish, Hebrew, or Swedish. The mean utterance lengths range up to about 1.7 morpehmes. There are both reanalyses of corpora in the literature and new corpora. The data…

The present investigation examines three hypotheses concerning the development of temporal coordination of consonant clusters in the speech of children at four age levels. Results reveal that five and seven-year-olds can be separated from older children and adults on the basis of absolute duration of consonants. (CHK)

Data on the acquisition of lexical tone were collected from 17 Mandarin-speaking children. Among other results, it was found that: (1) tone is acquired relatively quickly; (2) mastery of tones occurs well before mastery of segmentals; and (3) Mandarin high-level and falling tones are acquired before rising and dipping tones. (Author/RM)

In four studies, 60 two- and three-year-olds were studied in an elicited imitation task wherein the linguistic form of sentences was varied according to conjunction structure and pattern of redundancy deletion in conjunction reduction. Both factors were found to affect imitation. (Author/RM)

Discusses the inadequacies of the linguistic development theory called cognitive determinism and suggests instead the linguistic input hypothesis. Concludes that it is not either cognitive development or linguistic input that determines linguistic growth, but an interaction between them. (RM)

Two studies were conducted to discover possible patterns in question acquisition. For the production study, questions were collected from 22 children aged two to eleven. In the comprehension study, 100 children, aged three to five, were tested. The test controlled syntax and vocabulary and varied specific "wh-" question-words. (Author/RM)