The relation between text and idiom comprehension in children with poor text comprehension skills was investigated longitudinally. In the first phase of the study, six-year-old first graders with different levels of text comprehension were compared in an idiom and sentence comprehension task. Text comprehension was shown to be more closely related…

Analysis of mothers' pragmatic language use and children's language levels during free play sessions suggested that a mother-driven, direct influence model may be inappropriate for many mother speech-child language development relationships and points to the feasibility of child- and mother-driven explanatory models for indirect relationships.…

Followup to earlier report that focused on initial uses of first 10 words produced by 4 children is presented. Results of analysis of subsequent use of these 40 words is presented. Findings indicate that the role of linguistic input in early lexical development may decline sharply once a child has established initial uses for words. (24…