This study examined mother-child shared book reading behaviors before and after participation in a random-assignment responsive parenting intervention called Play and Learning Strategies (PALS) that occurred during infancy (PALS I), the toddler-preschool (PALS II) period, or both as compared with a developmental assessment (DAS) intervention (DAS…

The present paper is concerned with the language development of two young children from two different families growing up exposed to three languages. The children live in Switzerland and have been exposed to English, French and Swiss German from infancy. The focus is on the children's production of these languages, and the contextual and affective…

Two studies investigated two and four to five year olds' conversations to determine whether discussions about preferences differ from discussions about emotions and whether developmental differences exist in descriptions of affect. Found that children were more likely to discuss causes and consequences for emotions than for preferences. (MM)

Discusses an investigation of dimensions of development in speaking and writing between the ages of eight and twelve, focusing on both cognitive and affective processes. (AA)

Normal and abnormal language development depends to a great degree on the nature of the infant-mother relationship. (Author)

Compared 6-month-old hearing infants' responsiveness to infant-directed and adult-directed signing. Results replicated those found with deaf infants, namely that infants showed greater attentional and affective responsiveness to infant-directed sign than to adult-directed sign, suggesting that infants are prepared to detect sign motherese…

Reports on data collected in nine age ranges from 18 months to 71 months that examined children's ability to understand emotion-descriptive adjectives when used by adults and their own use of these words in productive vocabulary. (HOD)

Seven papers are provided. Mary Rainey's paper, "Style Switching in a Head Start Class," considers speech styles used in the classroom. "Language Acquisition in the Deaf: Some Suggestions for Inclusion in the Field Manual," by Carol Pfuderer, suggests areas of psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research relevant to the exploration of deaf…

Play sessions of two Mexican children (one five and one eight years old) with English-speaking friends were recorded and the use of language play was examined. Language play is viewed as a non-literal, rule-bound use of language that children engage in for its own sake, either cooperatively or competitively. Practice opportunities and children's…

Studied partner and site novelty for mother-infant, stranger-infant, and mother-stranger face-to-face interactions. Found that adult-infant vocal timing measures at age 4 months did predict attachment and cognition at age 12 months. Comparison of mother-infant and stranger-infant interactions suggested the dynamics of infants' early…

A study was conducted of the capacity of sixth-grade children to communicate accurately paralinguistic affect. A dependent measure indicating the accuracy of paralinguistic communication of affect was obtained by comparing the level of affect which children intended to encode with ratings of vocal inflections from adult judges. Four independent…