Onomatopoeia are disproportionately high in number in infants' early words compared to adult language. Studies of infant language perception have proposed an iconic advantage for onomatopoeia, which may make them easier for infants to learn. This study analyses infants' early word production to show a phonological motivation for onomatopoeia in…

Children are known to use different types of referential gestures (e.g., deictic, iconic) from a very young age. In contrast, their use of non-referential gestures is not well established. This study investigated the use of "stroke-defined non-referential" 'beat' gestures in a story-retelling and an exposition task by twelve 6-year-olds,…

Young children are slow to master conventional intonation patterns in their "yes/no" questions, which may stem from imperfect understanding of the links between terminal pitch contours and pragmatic intentions. In Experiment 1, five to ten-year-old children and adults were required to judge utterances as questions or statements on the…

This study investigated the relation between lexical development and the production of prosodic prominence in disyllabic babble and words. Monthly recordings from nine typically developing Belgian-Dutch-speaking infants were analyzed from the onset of babbling until a cumulative vocabulary of 200 words was reached. The differentiation between the…

It remains controversial whether children are able to process and integrate specific linguistic cues in their mental model to the same extent as adults. In the present study, a sentence continuation task was employed to determine how Italian speakers (4-, 5-, 6-year-olds and adults) interpret prosodic cues to decide which referent is more salient…

Reading with an adult plays an important role in developing children's oral language skills, phonological awareness and print knowledge. Parental reading aloud is also an indicator of children's later academic success, which suggests that the practice may be further linked to children's development of broader academic skills and behaviour, such as…

The evidence on the acquisition of intonation by children is reviewed. Reports on the early use of pitch contours fall into two categories, imitational and differential intonation. While imitational intonation is based on mimicry of adults, differential intonation involves the acquisition of two or three tunes that contrast in meaning from an…

Examines the prosodic characteristics of "motherese" in the speech of 24 German mothers. Each subject was recorded while addressing (1) her three- to five-day-old baby, (2) the absent infant, as if present, and (3) the adult interviewer. Several hypotheses regarding short and long term effects of "motherese" are discussed.…

The ontogenetic development of human vocal utterances and their role in early interaction processes were studied with a three-month-old baby. Recordings were made of infant vocalizations in the home and the sounds were classified. During a five-minute segment between the mother and infant, the infant produced 59 utterances, 93 percent of which had…

Three discourse-related formal aspects of model-imitation pairs were analyzed longitudinally in successive samples from two Hungarian children. Results revealed an unbroken developmental trend leading to lexically coherent conversational replies and that imitation aided the children in learning the lexicon, making phonological approximations of…

A collection of 21 papers, most presented at the Fifth International Conference on Contrastive Projects in June 1982 in Finland, includes: "Searching for Linguistic Universals through Contrastive Analysis,""Oral Discourse and Contrastive Analysis: Towards a French vs. Finno-Scandinavian Model,""Cultural Effect on the Comprehensibility of Reading…