What is vision's role in driving early word production? To answer this, we assessed parent-report vocabulary questionnaires administered to congenitally blind children (N = 40, Mean age = 24 months [R: 7-57 months]) and compared the size and contents of their productive vocabulary to those of a large normative sample of sighted children (N =…

The influence of motor knowledge on speech perception is well established, but the functional role of the motor system is still poorly understood. The present study explores the hypothesis that speech production abilities may help infants discover phonetic categories in the speech stream, in spite of coarticulation effects. To this aim, we…

The shared features that characterize the noun categories that young children learn first are a formative basis of the human category system. To investigate the potential categorical information contained in the features of early-learned nouns, we examine the graph-theoretic properties of noun-feature networks. The networks are built from the…

Describes a study of children's production of locative prepositions in order to test H. Clark's hypotheses regarding the acquisition of spatial terms. Subjects were required to describe the spatial arrangement of two balls arranged in each of three spatial dimensions. (SED)

Describes a study designed to compare color-name with shape-name learning by three-year-old children in an experimentally controlled format. Results show that children learned color-label associates significantly more slowly than matched shape-label associates, and they committed more errors with colors than with shapes during learning. Provides a…

Uses longitudinal data on language acquisition to examine children's language and sense of self and others. Referential analysis of children's discourse found that children do locate self and other in a spatio-temporal realm. Form-function analysis found that children's discourse about self was more varied in form and in semantic and pragmatic…

Reports a study which examines some of the properties of objects to determine whether the number of different examples of an object concept presented to infants influences concept learning and generalization and to discover whether children's behavior and language in relation to new objects influence learning the concept and generalization to new…

Research is reported which investigated the ability of four-month-old hearing infants to discriminate between gestures derived from American Sign Language. Findings show that infants possess the perceptual abilities to differentiate between signs that differ solely in terms of contrasts along a single underlying movement direction. (SED)

Presents two models of language acquisition: one postulating articulatory learning of underlying adult forms and the other both articulatory and perceptual learning. Reanalyzes the first model's data and concludes that two types of phonological rules are recognizable: perceptual-encoding rules and output (articulatory) rules. Identifies properties…

Examined the nature of infants' development of social knowledge and the role of caregivers' verbal responses to requests in learning about self and others. Found that, as indicated by changes in request-making behavior, children's conceptualization of the role of self in making requests changes with age; the nature of children's conceptualization…

Briefly reviews current knowledge about the nature of limits of intersubjectivity (ability to acquire and manage representations of self and other through social experience) in autistic children. Describes an observational study of verbal autistic children indicating the presence of intersubjectivity, but with little of the verbal social…

This study presents an account of position saliency in terms of children's ability to utilize graphic information, and in particular the serial encoding of information from letters in a graphic pattern. By varying the number and position of the letters distinguishing graphic patterns (positive condition) in a short-term recognition memory (STRM)…

Perception and production data were collected from 28 children, ages 1 year 8 months to 3 years 11 months to test four specific hypotheses on the acquisition of initial fricatives and glides in English, based on the assumptions that perception precedes production and unmarked precedes marked. Perception data were collected by the Shvachkin-Garnica…

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)