Personal narrative is decontextualized talk where individuals recount stories of personal experience about past or future events. As an everyday discursive speech type, narrative potentially invites parents and children to explicitly link together, generalize from, and make inferences about representations--that is, to engage in higher-order…

Personal narrative is decontextualized talk where individuals recount stories of personal experiences about past or future events. As an everyday discursive speech type, narrative potentially invites parents and children to explicitly link together, generalize from, and make inferences about representations--i.e., to engage in higher-order…

We compared the structure and the content of mothers' and fathers' infant-directed speech as a function of infant birth order. Seven first-born and four second-born infants were video-recorded during their natural dyadic interactions with their mothers and fathers at home from the second to the sixth month after birth at 15-day intervals.…

This study investigates parent-teacher dialogues on child language learning as constructed in 19 interviews with migrant parents of Polish ethnolinguistic background, resettled in Norway and caring for young preschoolers and school-goers. Targeting reported speech as a linguistic resource for enacting agency in discourse, the focal interest is in…

Acoustic emphasis may convey a range of subtle discourse distinctions, yet little is known about how this complex ability develops in children. This paper presents a first investigation of the factors which influence the production of acoustic prominence in young children's spontaneous speech. In a production experiment, SVO sentences were…

The study to be reported in this paper examined the work accomplished by "mm" and "mm hm" in the interactions of a parent and his daughter aged 0;10-2;0. Using the findings of Gardner (2001) for adults, the analysis shows that "mm" accomplished a range of functions based on its sequential placement and prosodic features, whereas "mm hm" was much…

Investigates the development of communicative competence during preschool age by analyzing certain types of communicative acts and sequences of communicative acts in adult-child and child-child communication. Assumes there are certain phases in which a child is especially prepared for the acquisition of certain types of communicative acts. (SED)

The analysis of videotaped, naturally occurring, adult-child interaction led to the isolation of the clarification request as a consistent feature of adult interactive styles. The importance of these demands, their nature, how adults deal with them, and their effects on children's communicative development are discussed. (CHK)

In a consideration of the development of referential communication performance, this paper describes three broad capacities that appear to underlie successful performance: the speaker's ability to analyze the persepective of the listener and formulate a message with this perspective in mind, the child's ability to meet the information processing…

Up to the present, no studies have been done in the area of child language in Mexico. The Center of Linguistic and Literary Studies of the Colegio de Mexico carried out an empirical investigation of the language of six- to seven-year-old Mexican children. This paper presents, in preliminary form, some partial results of the investigation,…

The intent of this study was to determine the extent to which preschool children's speech to self, their private speech, was differentiated from their social speech. Ten randomly chosen preschool children, six boys and four girls with a median age of 56 months, were observed in conditions supportive of oral communication (free play), and in…

A study examined the transition from dependent writing (dictation) to independent writing for 40 first grade students. Specifically, the study investigated (1) how, in terms of common quantitative language units (mean words per t-unit, mean number of dependent clauses, words per maze, mean number of dependent clauses per t-unit, and length in…

Previous research has shown how macro-structures can affect children's verbalizations. This study focuses on whether conversational contexts of forms are learned along with syntax, on what makes syntax, and on how to predict speech. Transcripts of videotapes of young children provided a matrix of function or act against actual utterance, wherein…