Carol Stoel-Gammon has made a real contribution in bringing together two fields that are not generally jointly addressed. Like Stoel-Gammon, we have long focused on individual differences in phonological development (e.g. Vihman, Ferguson & Elbert, 1986; Vihman, Boysson-Bardies, Durand & Sundberg, 1994; Keren-Portnoy, Majorano & Vihman, 2008). And…

A very basic feature of learning is the translation of what is heard or seen into a form that can be sotred in memore. This process of translation will be considered in relation to reception and as a possible cause of differences in learning performance. (Author)

Twenty children aged 3;0 to 3;10 were studied for behavior related to the acquisition of a single new word ("chromium," which was presented as designating the color olive green). The research was conducted in three cycles: prior to exposure to "chromium," at the time of a single encounter with that word, and about a week after the first encounter.…

This study explores children's development of dual-level phonological processing posited by generative theory for adult language users. Evidence suggesting 6-year-olds' utilization of morphophonemic segments was obtained by asking children to imitate complex words, omit specified portions, and discuss the meaning of the resulting word-parts. The…

Criticism of much of the previous research into the syntax of children's language. (RD)

Suggests that Goad & Ingram's (1987) argument in favor of a cognitive model of phonological development failed to recognize the uniqueness of each individual's neural and vocal structures, ignored documented variability in the phonetic patterns of prelexical infants, and inexplicably assumed that inter-child variability implied the operation of…

Describes two types of feedback (explicit and implicit) in the responses of four mothers to their two-year-old children and investigates whether these mothers respond differentiallly to their children's well-formed and ill-formed utterances with either type of feedback. Results demonstrate that a high proportion of maternal responses qualify as…

The role of cognitive and linguistic individual differences as well as contextual factors and processing complexity were examined as determinants of pronoun reversal (I/you). It is proposed that pronoun reversals commonly result from a failure to perform a deicitic shift, which is especially likely when children's psycholinguistic processing…

The current study attempts to differentiate effects of phonotactic probability (i.e. the likelihood of occurrence of a sound sequence), neighbourhood density (i.e. the number of phonologically similar words), word frequency, and word length on expressive vocabulary development by young children. Naturalistic conversational samples for three…

The phonemic inventories of 30 children (aged 3;4-5;7) with phonological delays were examined in terms of featural distinctions to address universal vs. individual accounts of acquisition. Phonetic inventories of the same children were also identified for comparison purposes. (Contains 40 references.) (JL)

Recurrence analysis is introduced as a means to investigate syntactic coordination between child and caregiver. Three CHILDES ( MacWhinney, 2000) corpora are analyzed and demonstrate coordination between children and their caregivers in terms of word-class n-gram sequences. Results further indicate that trade-offs in leading or following this…

Describes a study done to determine whether the degree of children's familiarity with component words was related to (1) their ability to produce productive patterns as opposed to associative and grouping patterns, and (2) their ability to use broader scope rather than lexically based patterns. (SED)

The diagnostic problem presented by children without obvious neurological, cognitive, genetic, emotional or environmental basis for their atypical or delayed language development is discussed. One unresolved issue is whether the deficits of such dysphasic children are linguistic or are more fundamental cognitive or perceptuomotor deficits. A…

Describes the presence of a phonological selection strategy and consonant harmony rule in one child's developing phonological system. Evidence suggests that this constant harmony constraint operated across morpheme boundaries, causing a delay in the onset of two-word utterances and influencing the selection of words that could occur in word…

Preschool children's responses to "wh-questions" (those including the concepts who, what, where, when, how, and why) were studied in order to determine the influence of socioeconomic status (SES) on frequency of correct and incorrect answers. Investigation focused on three questions: (1) When a response to a wh-question is incorrect,…