Describes a preschool child's gradual acquisition of a play language, Pig Latin, and discusses the abilities and errors that were measured over the course of acquisition. Acquisition improved as the subject developed language abilities involving word identification, first-consonant deletion, suffix creation, and short-term memory for speech units.…

Analysis of videotapes of 19 parent-child dyads during bookreading when children were 2.5 years old, and subsequent analysis of the children's paradigmatic thought organization at 3.5 years, revealed a significant correlation between superordinate level labels in parents' talk and 3 measures of children's paradigmatic organization. (45 references)…

A study evaluated how well autistic and non-autistic Japanese primary children (N=35) were able to describe the events in a five-frame cartoon. Results are discussed in terms of cognitive ability and linguistic skills. Discussion focuses on how to help autistic individuals improve their language once they have acquired its rudiments. (DJD)

Studied the effect of child-adult ratio on communication patterns in six Swedish day-care centers. Detailed records of verbal interactions were studied in group for which ratio was dramatically changed. Found that high child/adult ratio leads to increased adult-initiated monologs and decreased child-initiated communication. (AJH)

Some 76 hearing children in prekindergarten classes, half receiving sign instruction and half not, were tested on English vocabulary acquisition. Children who received the sign instruction scored significantly higher on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test than children receiving sign instruction. (Contains 15 references.) (Author/LB)

A microgenetic approach to studying grammatical morpheme learning uses longitudinal data from two children learning English in different ways. Eight general attributes of morphological systems are proposed that will promote or inhibit the emergence of filler syllables during development. (Contains 86 references.) (Author/LB)

Investigated simple, appearance-predicted, and reality-predicted labelling in 36 3-, 4-, and 5-year olds. An age-related appearance-reality shift was observed in simple labelling. It is argued that younger children maintained the one-label-per-predicate pattern because of inflexible encoding; older children did so because of better understanding…

Examines cognitive development in 141 children (ages 5 to 8) and the use of pragmatic cues for anaphora resolution performed in verbal and puppet tasks with biased and neutral sentences. Violations of pragmatic constraint decreased with age and task, consistent with the perspective-shift model. Parallel function effects in neutral sentences were…

Studied the relationship between parents' correcting of childrens' sentences and children's subsequent grammaticality. Found that parent's language corrections are related to children's subsequent grammaticality but that recasts of incorrect sentences serve as negative leading indicators of grammaticality. Also shows that correction and negative…

Examines the ability of monolingual English-speaking subjects to judge whether two spoken samples are from the same or different unknown foreign language. Performance of subjects was only a small degree above chance, while at the same time giving reliable information about recognition and identification skills. Further studies are needed. (16…

Picture naming in children was assessed as a function of two stimulus characteristics: the number of correct names for a picture and the degree to which a picture realistically represents the object. Two experiments showed that children named low-uncertainty objects faster than high-uncertainty objects with multiple correct names. Contains 50…

The effects of intonation morphemes on the processing of simple reversible sentences containing a dislocated element were studied using synthetic speech stimuli. Both child and adult subjects processed the sentences better when they retained standard subject-verb-object order, suggesting that the morphemes serve as processing instructions.…

Examines, through a longitudinal study, the temporal correspondences of 4 Japanese children, aged 7 to 11, in the attainment of specific milestones in play and language. All children proceeded through the same sequence of stages, but the rate of development was different depending on their environment. (34 references) (GLR)

Twenty-eight toddlers with slow expressive language development were compared to normally speaking age-mates and found to show delayed rather than deviant development in the average level of complexity of their syllable structures, the number of different consonant phonemes produced, and the percentage of consonants correctly produced in…

This paper investigates the development of interactive communication skills in 170 children aged 7 to 13. Results indicate that the development of interactive communication skills is rather different from the process of language acquisition both in the extended timescale involved and in the considerable variability exhibited by speakers of…