This study employs the Specificity Principle to examine the relative impacts of external (input quantity at home and at school, number of books and reading frequency at home, teachers' degree and experience, language usage, socioeconomic status) and internal factors (children's working memory, nonverbal intelligence, learning-related…

Social deficits have been implicated in the language delays and deficits of children with autism (ASD); thus, the extent to which these children use language input in social contexts similarly to typically developing (TD) children is unknown. The current study investigated how caregiver input influenced the development of "wh"-question…

Judgments of utterance appropriateness were examined in three, four, five, and six year olds to examine bases for these judgments in a variety of social contexts. The judgments of the six year olds more closely resembled those of a group of adults, but their judgments were not yet free of some of the factors operative for the younger children.…

Presents a variety of social contexts for verbal interaction between adult and child and between children. Discusses the variations in interaction caused by different contexts, as well as features that are consistent across contexts. (HTH)

The teaching of politeness formulas and their spontaneous use by young children were investigated. The use of such formulas as greetings and thanks was studied in terms of the cultural features that may interact with the learning of such formulas and the analyses children make concerning the situations in which they are used. Conversations were…

Using Tough's hierarchical analysis of language functions, this study found developmental differences in the communicative functions and strategies used by preschoolers in their conversations with one another. Generally found that females developed language strategies earlier than males and achieved a more advanced level of cognitive complexity…