Previous studies show that infants store functional morphemes for inferring syntactic categories of adjacent words, and they generally perform better with nouns than with verbs. In this study, we tested whether toddlers can exploit phrasal groupings for syntactic categorization in the face of noisy co-occurrence patterns. Using a visual fixation…

Studies on the acquisition of Spanish as a first language do not agree on the patterns and factors relevant for coda development. In order to shed light on the questions involved, a longitudinal study of coda development in Northern European Spanish was carried out to explore the relationship between accuracy, markedness and frequency. The study…

This study characterized early language abilities in toddlers with autism spectrum disorders (n = 257) using multiple measures of language development, compared to toddlers with non-spectrum developmental delay (DD, n = 69). Findings indicated moderate to high degrees of agreement among three assessment measures (one parent report and two direct…

Purpose: This study tests the hypothesis that toddlers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) will show differences from contrast groups in preferences for attending to speech. Method: This study examined auditory preferences in toddlers with ASD and matched groups of (a) typical age-mates, (b) age-mates with nonautistic developmental disabilities,…

Topic choice, topic synchrony, and utterance function during mother-child play sessions at age 3 were examined in 32 late talkers and 21 comparison children, matched at intake on age, socioeconomic status, and nonverbal ability. Late talkers and comparison children did not differ in number of utterances, topic initiation, topic synchrony, use of…

A comparison is presented of a mother's language to her Down Syndrome two-year-old and his normally developing twin. When interacting with the Down Syndrome twin, the mother used shorter mean length of utterance, greater type-token ratio, more confirmations, more verbal directives, fewer yes-no and true questions, and more directive questions.…

This longitudinal pilot study, which extends Veneziano's (1987) work on phonetically and semantically contingent maternal response types, compared, microanalytically and globally, maternal response types and mother-child dyadic interactions of normally developing and Down syndrome children. Participants were three normally developing infants, five…

The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) provided descriptive data on the speech and language of 25-month-olds. Findings indicated great range in the stage of expressive language development achieved. Girls showed more advanced skills than boys. A clear pattern was identified in use of sound classes. Child verbal comprehension…

This study investigated the earliest manifestations of verb tense and agreement in English-speaking children, using longitudinal data on the language of four children aged 1:6 to 3:5 years, drawn from a child-language database. Analysis focused on one aspect of inflectional phrase (IP), the children's use of the verbs "be" and "do" forms to mark…