In this article we report two studies: a detailed longitudinal analysis of errors in "wh"-questions from six German-learning children (age 2 ; 0-3 ; 0) and an analysis of the prosodic characteristics of "wh"-questions in German child-directed speech. The results of the first study demonstrate that German-learning children…

The phonetic characteristics of canonical babbling produced by Korean- and English-learning infants were compared with consonant and vowel frequencies observed in infant-directed speech produced by Korean- and English-speaking mothers. For infant output, babbling samples from six Korean-learning infants were compared with an existing English…

Contexts of limited input such as trilingual families where a language is not spoken in the wider community but only by a reduced number of speakers in the home provide a unique opportunity to examine closely the relationship between a child's input and what she learns to say. Barnes reported on the relationship between maternal input and a…

Argues that the measures of content and style of maternal talk used by the Murray and Trevarthen (1986) study of temporal patterning during vocal engagements did not directly indicate the ways in which the behaviors of the partners (mothers and infants) were combined on a moment-to-moment basis. (Author/CB)

Microanalyses of unstructured videotaped interactions of three mother-infant dyads revealed dramatic shifts in dyadic vocalization patterns from primarily overlapping to primarily alternating. These results suggest that the emergent patterns reflect increased potential for coordination within the dyad, which may be capitalized on by mother and…

In order to determine (1) the major speech characteristics of mothers and fathers and (2) the relationship between parental input and child language development, a longitudinal analysis of parents' input language was conducted during the period in which four first-born children progressed from no words to the stable use of one-word utterances in…

Describes adjustments in speech patterns made by two- and three-year-olds when talking to their 14-month-old siblings and compares these changes with those made by mothers addressing their babies. Individual differences between the children indicate two types of influence on the adjustments made--pragmatic and emotional. (EKN)

Discusses the modifications in the direction of simplified and more linear language (American Sign Language) used by deaf mothers with their deaf children. (EKN)

Tests the hypothesis that mothers would label objects with adult-basic level terms when talking to other adults, but would label the same objects with child-basic terms when speaking to their young children who were just starting to talk, even though these labels may be very much "incorrect" by adult standards. (Author/RH)

Samples of spontaneous speech were collected from 20 English and 20 German preschool children and their mothers. The children's frequency of use of various tenses was compared at different age levels within each language, across languages, and with their mothers' frequency of tense usage in speech to the children. (Author/JMB)

Analysis of mothers' pragmatic language use and children's language levels during free play sessions suggested that a mother-driven, direct influence model may be inappropriate for many mother speech-child language development relationships and points to the feasibility of child- and mother-driven explanatory models for indirect relationships.…

Examines issues relating to similarity neighborhoods of words in children's lexicons. Young children's receptive vocabularies were analyzed for three-phoneme, four-phoneme and five-phoneme words. The pattern of the original results from Charles-Luce & Luce (1990) was replicated. (18 references) (Author/CK)

Examines naturalistic adult-to-child speech of Italian middle class mothers to determine which patterns characterize linguistic input to infants. Because Italian is a pro-drop language, adult-to-child speech revealed bias toward more salient semantic and morphological significance of verbs relative to nouns, and verbs will likely occupy…

A study was conducted to determine the relationship between maternal input to early language learners and language acquisition and to answer the following questions: (1) Does nursery language used with the child change after he begins to talk? (2) Is there reason to believe that the child's speech is influenced by or influences the mother's…

Reports results of a longitudinal study of the acquisition of first words by 18 infants. Strategies used in word acquisition and environmental variables related to language development were investigated. Results were analyzed in terms of an interaction model of the language-learning process. (DP)