This study compared narratives in Spanish, Basque, and English of a 5-year-old trilingual child. The child produced narratives of a familiar story, learned through an English video recording, in each language while looking at a printed version of the story. All interlocutors were adult native speakers of the languages, well known to the child. The…

Examines the relationship between phonetic substitution patterns in child speech and sound change patterns in dialects of adult language, basing an explanation of these phenomena on acoustic data and language universals. (AM)

Observation of severely to profoundly deaf four- to nine-year-olds (N=24) producing three types of multi-morphemic classifier predicates in American Sign Language showed that handshape production was influenced both by morphological and syntactic complexity, while handshape errors were not based on anatomical complexity alone. (26 references)…

Assesses verb phrase development in three Trinidadian children in which Standard English and Trinidad Creole coexist. Adverbials were found to be crucial in delineating specific areas of semantic intent. (20 references) (GLR)

Compares the prosodic modifications in mothers' and fathers' speech to preverbal infants in American and British English, French, German, Japanese, and Italian. Speech samples were instrumentally analyzed to measure mean fundamental frequency, variability, utterance, duration, and pause duration. (67 references) (Author/CB)

Presents an analysis of five first-person oral narratives of Aboriginal children of Western Australia recorded outside the classroom. These narratives are compared with a first-person oral narrative of a non-Aboriginal child and with teacher-led interactions in the classes of which the Aboriginal children are members. (26 references) (Author/CK)

A study of the "silent period" in second-language learning focused on behavior of a 6-year-old Polish child shortly after immigration, in interaction with American children, bilingual Polish-American children, and another recent English-learner. Comparing play environments allowed identification of characteristics of interaction with…

Presents evidence for four major design features of serial organization of speech arising from comparison of babbling and early speech with patterns in ten languages. Maintains that no explanation for the design features is available from Universal Grammar; except for intercyclical consonant repetition development, perceptual-motor learning seems…

An analysis of language acquisition in English and Dutch focuses on a theory of phrase structure. It is argued that the previously posited phrase structure operations of projection and adjunction can be dispensed with in favor of the single operation of "merge." One version of merge is shown to account for a range of data from child English and…

A study investigated the patterns of question use in Mandarin Chinese-speaking parents' and caregivers' interactions with children, and how they characterize social class differences. Subjects were 10 children, aged 21-23 months, and their families, selected from immunization records in Beijing, China. Parents were all native speakers of Mandarin…

The conversational narratives of 17 Japanese children aged 5 to 9 were analyzed using stanza analysis. Three distinctive features emerged: (1) the narratives are exceptionally succinct; (2) they are usually free-standing collections of three experiences; and (3) stanzas almost always consist of three lines. These features reflect the basic…

This article shows that bilingualism can be an enriching part of children's lives. A young child named Anna, living in a bilingual environment in which English and Finnish were spoken, was observed and her speech recorded. This discussion focuses on aspects of Anna's acquisition of language. Initial discussion works toward a definition of…

This work is an English translation of the author's classic "Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze," first published in 1941. It is considered the most representative and comprehensive of the author's phonological writings, dealing not only with phonological typology but related problems of language acquisition and phonemic regression…

This study examined (1) the level of symbolic capability as revealed in play, (2) the use of spontaneous vocal imitation, and (3) the nature of certain classes of words occurring in spontaneous infant language. Facets of child behavior were examined during the period of single-word utterances and early multiword combinations with a view to…

Mongoloid children appear to be useful candidates for studying difficult methodological problems found in developmental research. They represent a subpopulation in which general development is markedly slower than in the normal child and in which language development appears to be more dependent on age than general intellectual development. This…