Families' mealtime talk has significant implications for children's language development. This study investigated five middle-class Australian Chinese families that differ in their lifestyles and meal routines. It aims to explore: (1) the nature of the Chinese parents' language use in interactions with children at mealtime; and (2) the factors…

This paper draws on observational studies of three young children in order to demonstrate firstly, their intrinsic motivation to explore systematically through repeated patterns of action or 'schemas'; secondly, how those repeated actions appear and are explored in their emerging language demonstrating their increasing construction of and…

A study of the signing of six deaf preschoolers found that they produced phonological and morphological errors, and semantic overgeneralizations, comparable to those made by hearing children when learning to speak. This suggests that deaf children actively construct sign language rules in the same way that hearing children build up the rules of…