Investigates the evolution of specific lexical and syntactical clues and the recurrence of various semantic fields in mothers' spontaneous speech to their infants. Content of mothers' speech was related to age in newborn to 10-month-old children. (Author/RH)

Determined if young children can evaluate the adequacy of communications and situations that specify or omit deictic information critical to the listener's performance. Results showed that all subjects discriminated among deictically adequate and inadequate communications, but that 6-year-olds made fewer correct judgments than did 9-year-olds and…

Finds that self-reported loneliness was not related to depression or social anxiety for either young or older adults, and was not related to young or older adults' social skill as measured by partner attention. Indicates that social anxiety, however, was related to social skill during intergenerational conversations. (SR)

Tested first, second, and fourth graders for understanding of private keys, that is, referential utterances used to inform selectively. Examined children's sensitivity to common ground context of utterance and appreciation of audience design and speaker intent. Found gradual development of understanding over age range. (BC)

Investigated effects of stuttering on gesture for adults and children. Found through transcription of videotaped narratives that during bouts of stuttering, the coexpressed gesture always waits for fluent speech to resume. Also found that the lower ratio of spoken words to coexpressed gestures for children may be due to lower attentional/cognitive…

Three levels of metacommunication knowledge and five factors that influence the understanding of speaker meaning in oral language were identified in pilot interviews with children and adolescents. (HOD)

Early interventionists are accountable for the progress of children receiving their services. Technically adequate measures of the progress of individual children are needed. While the Early Communication Indicator (ECI) for infants and toddlers is one such measure, data to support its use are limited to a single research report. In this…

Investigates whether first- and fourth-grade children vary their production of redundant messages (saying more than the minimal necessary to be informative) as a function of sharing common experience with a listener. (HOD)

Examines the quality of communicative interaction and task performance among younger and older women in relation to conversation distance and density. Results indicate that older persons exhibit positive communication behaviors in response to spatial intrusions while younger subjects show the negative, compensatory withdrawal behaviors normally…

Examined the speech patterns of three- to eight-year-old children. Results showed that the children most often used "ah" phenomena and unfilled pauses as do adults. "Ah" phenomena showed a significant increase with age, especially between five and six among the females. (SRT)

A study examined the communication and conflict strategizing of high school youth to determine the differences between biological sex groups and grade level groups. Data were collected from 217 senior high school students (79 males and 138 females; 162 10th-graders and 55 11th- and 12th-graders), all of whom were enrolled in a required course in…

Describes two experiments comparing how children evaluate three types of uninformative messages (ambiguous, incomplete, inconsistent) and whether and why the speaker's age affects the evaluation of each. (HOD)

Examines theoretical issues concerning the development of and the unity or diversity underlying private speech and studies the developmental progression of private speech in a low-income, culturally different sample. The effects of age, sex, environmental context, and the relationship of social speech to varieties of private speech are also…