Reports on data collected in nine age ranges from 18 months to 71 months that examined children's ability to understand emotion-descriptive adjectives when used by adults and their own use of these words in productive vocabulary. (HOD)

Explores the underlying knowledge that children have about the relationship between the structure of requests and the relative status of speakers and listeners. Shows that the three age groups (preschoolers, 5-year-olds, and 10-year-olds) could systematically differentiate the requests by means of syntactic directness or semantics. (HOD)

Examined in a longitudinal study of children were correspondences and correlations between early language development on the one hand, and the manipulation of objects and play development on the other. There were developmental correspondences between the onset of five language landmarks (the emergence of first word, referential word, demonstrative…

An experiment examined whether children of different developmental stages expressed different levels of fear while viewing episodes of the television program, "The Incredible Hulk." Preoperational (3 to 5 years old) and concrete operational (9 to 11 years old) children were shown short videotaped segments taken from the program. Using…

This document reviews a number of recent studies written in French that investigate the nature of communication between 2-year-old infants and others. The review includes three parts. The first part focuses on studies aiming to constitute a behavioral catalog of the child. Characteristically, these studies offer a posteriori interpretations of…

Examines the understanding of the pragmatic function of mental terms ("think,""know,""guess") to express the relative certainty of 69 children aged 3-11. Results showed an improvement with age for the "know-think" and "know-guess" contrasts, but no improvement with age for the…

Two experiments test hypothesis that development of children's comprehension monitoring skills in the referential communication paradigm is based in part on ability to differentiate the literal sentence meaning of speaker's direction from the meaning or intention that speaker wished to convey. (Author/RWB)

Kindergarten children were observed in a classroom situation to discover communicative competence in the sociolinguistic area. These children demonstrated competency in awareness of regularities in use of language in the classroom, ability to publicize confusions, and variations in ways of speaking. (DF)

Evaluates the effects of presenting verbal models following the initiations or expressions of interest of 16 children aged 28 to 34 months on both production and comprehension abilities measures. Results suggest that the timing of exposure to language models plays a critical role in language acquisition. (RJC)

The use of deictic words from 5 classes by 4 preschool teachers and 12 children with hearing losses was examined. Teachers used a total of 648 deictic words versus the children's 172 examples. Personal pronouns were the most frequently used class, followed by demonstrative pronouns, adverbs of location, shifting reference verbs, and adverbs of…

This bibliographic review aims to present a single comprehensive source of references to facilitate clinical application of data obtained on the vocal activity of normal infants and to facilitate continued research on prelinguistic vocal output. The bibliography cites the published observational, empirical, and theoretical reports that examine the…

This article uses a parable to compare qualitative (interpretive) and quantitative (experimental) methods in child language research. Two hypothetical young researchers both investigate question-asking behavior of children with autism. Five different possible endings to the parable illustrate various relationships among research approaches and…

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)

The study investigated the effectiveness of a pragmatic language function protocol with a sample of 240 normal preschool children, aged 2-5, in a structured setting. The protocol was shown to be used reliably and was sensitive to differences in the mastery of language skills of normal children of different ages. (Author/JDD)

This research is testing the suggestion that acquisition and representation of formal language knowledge of dysphasic children is qualitatively different from the normal language acquisition/representation processes. In a cohort-sequential design, aspects of language and cognitive development of 120 dysphasic children aged 6-14 are being analyzed…