This study explored Mandarin-speaking mothers' referential choice in relation to informativeness. The data consisted of two Mandarin-speaking mothers' natural conversation with their children, collected when the children were between the ages of 2;2 and 3;1. The subject and object arguments of the mothers' utterances were coded for the categories…

Adult Kuwaitis were interviewed to ascertain whether or not they modified their speech when talking to young children. Those who indicated they did not were recorded while they were interacting with a young child. Results show that all modified their speech in accordance with the standard descriptions of motherese. (Author/VWL)

Examines joint attentional processes in children's early lexical acquisition and conversational interaction. Early language development builds on adult-child joint attentional focus on nonlinguistic entities. A developmental sequence of joint attentional processes in early language development is proposed, and the role of adults in this sequence…

Reports on studies examining the extent to which mothers tailor their speech to a child's level of linguistic ability. Methodological implications for language acquisition research are discussed. (AM)