This study examined the relationship between viewing an infant DVD and expressive and receptive language outcomes. Children between 12 and 15 months were randomly assigned to view "Baby Wordsworth," a DVD highlighting words around the house marketed for children beginning at 12 months of age. Viewings took place in home settings over 6 weeks.…

Between March 2009 and March 2011, Talk To Your Baby has been engaged in a research project, under the title of Face to Face, to identify key messages for parents and carers in relation to communicating with babies and young children, and has examined the most effective ways to promote these messages to parents and carers. The Face to Face project…

Identifies why children talk to themselves (private speech) and the crucial role that such speech plays in their cognitive development. Reviews research in children's egocentric or private speech development and suggests ways for adults to encourage private speech in learning environments. (DT)

Data on four infants between the ages of 12 and 20 months were collected to answer two questions about children's communication behavior. (1) Is there a correspondence between communicative intentions expressed in gestures and vocal utterances? If both spring from common organismic tendencies, it should be possible to discern an "indicating"…

Investigates why young children become redundant and informative speakers after listening to nonredundant and informative speakers. The authors conclude that children confuse the length of a message with information. (Author/DB)

Recent studies have documented the importance of a variety of contextualization cues such as intonation, voice quality, volume, and pitch in conversation. The appropriate use of and response to them presupposes that one has certain kinds of linguistic and sociocultural knowledge. There remains, however, the question of how children acquire this…

Compared production of gestures, signs, and words by a child simultaneously acquiring sign language and speech to that of a group of children exposed only to speech. Found that exposure to sign language influences the extent to which the manual modality of expression is used for communicative purposes but does not alter the rate or course of…

Investigates differences in the language learning environments of six twin pairs and 12 singleton toddlers (all firstborn) with special reference to pragamatic factors that might be expected to differ in dyadic and triadic interactive situations. (HOD)

This publication (one of a series) contains 12 articles which report the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instruments for its investigation, and practical applications. Articles in the publication are: "Dynamics and Coordinate Systems on Skilled Sensorimotor Activity" (Elliot L. Saltzman); "Speech Motor…

Explores research on development of integrated speech-gesture system from its origins during the one-word period of language learning through childhood. Concludes that, although there may be a brief period prior to onset of two-word speech during which gesture and speech are not well integrated, ability to convey and interpret speech and gestures…

Describes a 14-year program of research, the focus of which was the capacity of normal infants to incorporate gestural symbols into their earliest expressive vocabularies. Explores the effects of such gesturing on vocal language development, the theoretical implications for researchers, and the practical applications for parents. (Author/EV)

This research review sought to discover the forms of family verbal interaction that nurture language development in infants and toddlers, the function of different family members in this process, and the role of environmental factors in language development. Results indicate that speech to a child is significantly different from speech to an…

This study lends support to the modes of speech continuum and points to a relationship between linguistic and communicative competence. Results indicated that communicative competence of preschoolers increased with age and suggested a hierarchy from context-centered through topic-centered probes. Correlations with linguistic competence indicated…

This publication (one of a series) contains 14 articles which report the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instruments for its investigation, and practical applications. Articles include: "The Universality of Intrinsic FO of Vowels: (D. H. Whalen and Andrea G. Levitt); "Intrinsic F0 of Vowels in the Babbling of 6-,…

One of a series of quarterly reports, this publication contains 11 articles which report the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instruments for its investigation, and practical applications. Articles in the publication are: "Evidence of Flexible Coding in Visual Word Recognition" (Kenneth R. Pugh and others);…