Support for baby signing (BS) with hearing infants tends to converge toward three camps or positions. Those who advocate BS to advance infant language, literacy, behavioral, and cognitive development rely heavily on anecdotal evidence and social media to support their claims. Those who advocate BS as an introduction to another language, such as…

Uncertainty was researched as a perceptual structure which mediates the transition from sensorimotor activity to language. The guiding notions are that the attentional system is geared to uncertainty from the beginning of life and that a speaker's language use is coordinated with this system as it emerges. (Author)

Relationships between "combinatorial" abilities in language, symbolic play, blockbuilding, and non-semantic action sequences were explored in a study of 30 infants between 82 and 91 weeks of age. Subjects were observed in a laboratory playroom setting for approximately 45 minutes. During this time, a number of tasks were administered…

Study data point to a significant difference between the ability of normal and language-disabled children at the holophrastic stage to use their lexicon to communicate to a listener in a context. (MP)

In three experiments, a multiple habituation paradigm was used to examine the ability of 7- and 9-month-old prelinguistic infants to form a natural, basic-level object category. Findings constitute independent evidence for the existence of a linguistically relevant nonlinguistic category prior to the onset of word comprehension. (SED)

The relationship of object permanence and classification skills to receptive and expressive language development was investigated in infants. Object permanence, classification, and parent-child verbal interaction ratings were about equally related to language comprehension functioning, while permanence was more strongly related to language…

Reviews evidence for a developmental sequence in symbolic play and attempts to provide a theoretical rationale for predicting correspondences between symbolic play and early language. (Author/RH)

Discusses the audio and video-recorded longitudinal data from six infants with varying degrees of vision. The findings indicate that there are basic differences in early language, which appear to reflect differences in cognitive development. (SL)

Four children were videotaped playing with their mothers, first in a situation with gestures, and then in a situation without gestures. Results showed that maternal gestures have more of a role in maintaining attention and flow of interaction for young children than they do in providing specific cues to the grammar the child is acquiring. (SL)

The use of "wh" forms in questions asked by four children was recorded from age 22 to 36 months, and analyzed. In the emergence of "wh" forms, the children first asked identifying questions with "what" and "who," followed in order by (1) "wh" pronominal questions which ask for major sentence…

Discusses children's acquisition of non-nominal, abstract words and argues that the use of these words parallels the child's cognitive development in trial-and-error problem solving and in development of insight. (EKN)

Indicates that 18- to 20-month-old infants can detect the correspondence between auditorially and visually perceived speech; that is, they manifest some of the components related to lip-reading phenomena in adults. This demonstration of the bimodal perception of speech in infancy has important implications for social, cognitive, and linguistic…

Attempts to determine whether children can use social-pragmatic cues to determine "what kind" of referent, object, or action an adult intends to indicate with a novel word. Doubts that children assume that a novel word refers to whatever nameless object is present. Suggests that lexical acquisition rests fundamentally on children's…

Examines whether knowledge of functional properties of a referent for a new name influences children's first guesses about whether that name refers to an object or a substance. Suggests that children do not rely on a single source of information, but rather draw on various kind of information, including perceptual characteristics of the entities…

To investigate cross-sectionally and longitudinally the development of children's early verbal behavior, 10 normal first-born Japanese infants from middle-class families were observed monthly and examined from when they were 6 to 24 months of age. Audio- and video-taped language data were obtained in a laboratory playroom setting during 15-minute…