This dissertation draws on both qualitative and quantitative approaches to investigate the linguistic practices of teachers and children who are learning Mandarin Chinese as a Heritage Language (CHL) in two dual immersion preschools in California. CHL children have been interpreted as novice members in local speech communities who actively explore…

The study involving 35 normal preschoolers suggested that normal preschoolers appear to create faster mappings (rapid creating of lexical representations for unfamiliar words) containing a great deal of linguistic and nonlinguistic information on the basis of even brief, casual encounters with new words. (Author/CL)

The results suggested that although blind children are generally competent in language, they utilize a number of linguistic strategies that differentiate them from sighted language users. (Author)

Analysis of interaction between pairs of deaf and hearing preschoolers indicated that both roles in dialogue (speaker-initiator and speaker-responder) were used by dyads, but their pattern of performance was different. Deaf speaker-initiators displayed a narrower range of complexity in their utterances while deaf speaker-responders were less…

In two experiments, preschoolers interpreted a novel count noun applied to an unfamiliar stuffed animal as referring to a basic-level (such as a person or a dog) kind of object rather than to a context (such as a passenger) or a life-phase (such as a puppy) kind of object. (MDM)

Results were that the children's mean length of utterance scores were better for the home sample, although there was no difference between their developmental sentence scores for the home sample and the clinic sample. (Author/SBH)

The study involving four teachers, two tutors, and ten preschool hearing impaired children investigated both the linguistic relationship between adult and child utterances and the teaching strategies involved in the process of interacting. A literature review focuses on three major areas--language interaction between adults and normally hearing…

This article explores the kinds of cues young children use as a basis for extending early works in an effort to label novel referent objects. Proposals that intend to explain how first words are extended and used to refer to objects or events for which no words explicitly exist are discussed. (DF)

Preschoolers were taped while individually interacting with each of their parents. Tapes were transcribed and the language forms used by children and parents were counted. These forms included constructions involving the contraction "let's"; colloquial lexical items such as "whatchamacallit"; tag questions such as "You're…

Concludes that the tendency to produce speech interruptions at the beginning of utterances, or pronouns, and conjunctions appears to be a characteristic of young children's speech. (RB)

In three experimental studies of children aged 3 to 6, training was shown to improve both the mastery of grammatical rules and linguistic correctness. (MS)

This article reviews recent research on phonological development and characteristics associated with different forms of delay. Language-delayed students are considered categorizable at 24 months as either "late talkers" with no major deviations from patterns of normal acquisition or disordered students whose developmental patterns are markedly…

A study analyzed oral narrative and emergent storybook reading by 40 children (half with language impairment) ages 2-4. Children with language impairment were less able to produce language features associated with written language, used past-tense verbs less frequently in both contexts, and used personal pronouns less in the oral narratives.…