Describes two studies of word meaning acquisition among children. Concludes that (1) even very young children can learn new words and their meanings on basis of linguistic expressions and in absence of direct experience with referents, and (2) that particular forms of discourse (e.g., narrative and dialogue) can render new meanings more accessible…

Posits that a child's success in acquiring English may depend to a large degree on his or her proficiency in the heritage language. (CB)

Comparison of Italian and English-speaking children's (N=200) segmentation abilities indicated that the discrepancies between the language groups reflected the children's phonologic and orthographic differences. (CB)

Discusses research results that demonstrate that nonlinguistic symbolic deficits of language-impaired children may actually reflect resource allocation constraints and cross-modality deficits. Discusses implications of studies that contrast symbolic action development in normally developing children with that in children with specific language…

Presents observations of three children's styles of symbolic language focusing on how each leaned to different degrees on drawing and talking to create their imaginary worlds and thus faced different challenges in rendering those worlds in print. (SRT)

Examines the meanings young children express in talk, pictures, and written text, focusing on the integration of the three. Findings illustrate children's exploration of imagined worlds through drawing and talk and the potential problems children face in transferring those worlds to text. (SRT)

Crib-talk between identical twin girls and diary records of their speech were examined. It was found that the subjects developed conventional syntax and vocabulary but adapted them in ways which appropriately expressed their twin status. (Author/SED)

Three- and four-year-old children were asked to perform a judgement task in which they chose between incorrect English transitives and intransitives and their correct adult equivalents. Purely semantic or syntactic models fail to explain the findings as well as does a model based on semantic/syntactic transitivity. (SED)

Assesses the interrelations among the functional properties of maternal speech, the structural properties of maternal speech, and child language growth for a period of six months for 22 two-year-old children and their mothers. (HOD)

Explores the relations among combinatorial capacities in language, symbolic play, blockbuilding, and nonsemantic action sequences within a sample of 18- to 24-month-old children, as well as assessing the developmental level of a selected subset of concepts. (HOD)

Reveals that in the average number of words per T-unit, the complexity of basal reader passages generally exceeds that of children's oral language, and that none of the basal series studied exhibited a graduated increase in average number of words per T-unit among passages in the same reader. (FL)

Describes the development of a 99-word multiple meaning word list and offers activities designed to develop children's knowledge of multiple meaning words. (FL)

Describes a class project involving collaborative partnerships in which fifth graders wrote books for first graders. (HTH)

Reports two studies which investigated the acquisition of color terms by preschool children. The first was designed to clarify the role of certain conceptual factors in the acquisition of color terms. The second explored how input may interact with these conceptual factors and help to guide the acquisition of color words. (SED)

Describes a study which sought to determine the developmental stage at which children begin to differentiate specific and neutral contingent queries. The study manipulated the familiarity of the adult listener by having each of the 22 children interact both with the mother and with an unfamiliar adult experimenter. (SED)