Data from 492 Italian infants (8-18 months) were collected with the parental questionnaire MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventories to describe early actions and gestures (A-G) "vocabulary" and its relation with spoken vocabulary in both comprehension and production. A-G were more strongly correlated with word comprehension…

The early noncry vocalizations of infants are salient social signals. Caregivers spontaneously respond to 30%-50% of these sounds, and their responsiveness to infants' prelinguistic noncry vocalizations facilitates the development of phonology and speech. Have infants learned that their vocalizations influence the behavior of social partners? If…

It was hypothesized that children may experience more difficulty in interpreting "after" than "before" because the sentence typically used in comprehension tasks facilitates dependence on sentence-processing strategies effective with "before" sentences but only partially effective with "after" sentences. For…

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)

Results imply that in early childhood education the language of test instructions and reading programs could be better geared to the child's linguistic competence. (Author)

Complex complements are clausal objects containing tensed verbs (e.g., that she cried) or infinitives (e.g., to cry), following main verbs of communication or mental activities (e.g., say, want). This research examined whether English- and Cantonese-speaking 4-year-olds' complement understanding uniquely predicts their representation of other…

Questions whether children's use of language indicates they (1) understand temporal sequence, (2) distinguish goal-oriented from nongoal-oriented activities, and (3) prefer discussing the aspect of events prior to the time of events. Also investigates whether findings for past and future conditions are parallel. (Author/DB)

Subjects ranging in age from 7 to 12 years selected correct story completion alternatives significantly more often when these alternatives were similes than when they were semantically equivalent metaphors, and when alternatives specifically denoted the referent of the metaphorical comparison than when the identity of the referent had to be…

The concepts of front, back, and side may be easily understood in relation to an intrinsically fronted item, but with a nonfronted object they depend on situational or psychological cues. A study investigated a child's awareness of the front, back, and side of his own body and of fronted and nonfronted objects. Researchers hypothesized that a…