We study the ability of children to provide an appropriate continuation for a stimulus sentence, taking into account the joint demands of situational aspect and grammatical aspect. We hypothesize that the aspectual transitions required by some aspectual combinations play a role in the difficulty of providing an appropriate continuation for them.…

Characterizing early communicative development in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is valuable for understanding profiles of ability in this population. The current investigation was modeled on Charman, Drew, Baird & Baird (2003b). Analyses explored parent report of early vocabulary, non-verbal communication, functional object use and…

There are many postulates of a relation between quality of attachment with theory of mind and language functions (e.g., de Rosnay & Hughes, 2006). The current study examined in longitudinal design how different patterns of attachment are associated with usage of internal state language at ages 17, 23, 30 and 36 months. Transcripts of mother-child…

In an investigation of discourse sensitivity, Catalan-speaking children aged 4 to 8 years were asked two different questions in a picture description task. One was a wide-focus question ("What is happening?"); the other was a narrow-focus question ("What is happening to 'the patient'?"). Children of all age groups displayed sensitivity to the…

During phonological development, children frequently produce consonant clusters as consonant singletons, a process commonly referred to as cluster reduction. The principles of sonority may provide a theoretical basis for explaining patterns of cluster reduction evident in children's speech. Two studies were conducted to investigate whether…

This study documents the development of symbolic, spatial, and temporal displacement of toddler's speech. Fifty-six children and their mothers were observed longitudinally 5 times from 18 to 30 months of age during a staged communication play while they engaged in scenes that encouraged interacting, requesting, and commenting and scenes that…

We examined infants' recognition of functors and the accuracy of the representations that infants construct of the perceived word forms. Auditory stimuli were "Functor + Content Word" versus "Nonsense Functor + Content Word" sequences. Eight-, 11-, and 13-month-old infants heard both real functors and matched nonsense functors (prosodically…

Few studies have focused on mechanisms of developmental change during the prelinguistic period. The lack of focus on early vocal development is surprising given that maternal responsiveness to infants during the first two years has been found to influence later language development. In addition, in a variety of species, social feedback is…

This article is about the contributions children make in clinical interviews. This issue is studied by re-analysing a selection of the empirical excerpts used by Piaget in his seminal book The Child's Conception of the World. The focus is on how children use language non-literally, and especially on how they use meta-communicative markers ("as…

An overview of the babbling stage in child language acquisition, which occurs normally at age six months to one year, looks at research on this period. The babbling stage is preceded by arbitrary infant vocalization and is succeeded by production of simple but recognizable words. Babbling represents a period of increasing pattern and articulatory…

This study examined word meanings in the single word period of language learning. Ten children were seen for 5 hours each month from the time they started learning language until their median length of utterance was 2.5 words. All the children's utterances, and the extralinguistic contexts of the utterances, such as objects and movements, were…

Results of two experiments support these hypotheses: 1) children tend to treat contradictions and tautologies as empirical statements, due to their nonempirical character, not merely to the logical words occurring in them; and 2) the ability to examine language objectively is necessary for the ability to correctly evaluate nonempirical statements.…

A non-English portion of the universal initial-cluster hierarchy is cognitively represented in English-speaking monolingual children and adolescents. Subjects in an experiment were asked to select frequency of non-English consonant clusters, and they were able to reconstruct the phonological hierarchy. (CK)

A survey examining the effect of sex, age and social class on the development of the speech habits of children of elementary school age in Germany. (Text is in German.) (TL)

A study is reported which examined the acquisition of deictic verbs by asking children to identify the speaker or the addressee of utterances containing "come,""go,""bring," and "take." Analysis showed that children go through several stages in the acquisition of deictic verbs. (Author/RM)