What are the vocal experiences of children growing up on Malakula island, Vanuatu, where multilingualism is the norm? Long-form audio-recordings captured spontaneous speech behavior by, and around, 38 children (5-33 months, 23 girls) from 11 villages. Automated analyses revealed most children's vocal input came from female adults and other…

Purpose: The aim of this study is to analyze the changes in temporal synchrony between gesture and speech of multimodal communicative behaviors in the transition from babbling to two-word productions. Method: Ten Spanish-speaking children were observed at 9, 12, 15, and 18 months of age in a semistructured play situation. We longitudinally…

Purpose: The ontogeny of mandibular control is important for understanding the general neurophysiologic development for speech and alimentary behaviors. Prior investigations suggest that mandibular control is organized distinctively across speech and nonspeech tasks in 15-month-olds and adults and that, with development, these extant forms of…

Data on intentional communication by 15 normal children (ages 11-14 months at outset) were collected at three stages (prelinguistic, one-word, multiword) over the course of a year. All displayed acts for regulating behavior, engaging in social interaction, and referencing joint attention at each stage but with changing proportions. (Author/VW)

This research disputes the traditional position on babbling by showing that the phonetic content of babbled utterances exhibits many of the same preferences for certain kinds of phonetic elements and sequences that have been found in the production of meaningful speech by children in later stages of language development. (Author/RM)

Through discussion and illustrative events, an evolving segment of communication is described during the course of transition of one child's total communication system from the sensorimotor or gestural level at 12 months into the level of use of the adult words "more" and "mine," and associated utterances, at 24 months. (Author/RM)

A study is described, the results of which indicate that mothers can recognize the cries of their own infants from tape-recorded cry samples with few instances of confusion, and that the sex of an unknown infant cannot be reliably identified using a simple auditory identification paradigm. (Author/RM)

Reviews new developments in the field of child language acquisition that emphasize the role of communication and dialogue. Mentions work on precursors to dialogue in infancy, the development of communicative intent, and the importance of cognitive over syntactic strategies of language processing by the young child. (Author/SS)

The early acquisition of the interrogative system, with data from Serbo-Croatian, is investigated. The subject is approached from the angle of adult-child interaction. A first-born pair of dizygotic twins were observed, beginning a month prior to the time when they first began to produce questions. (Author/RM)

Reviews research on the development of intentional communication between adult and child. Suggests that the communicative partnership between caregiver and child is dynamic, functioning to assist in the developmental achievements of the child and also functioning as a mechanism for socializing the child and his or her partner into the appropriate…

The feedback model of maternal language indicates that maternal language development is tailored to child feedback. The conversational model indicates that adjustment in mothers' speech occurs before the onset of child language. In order to verify the validity of these models, the language of mothers of six hearing and six deaf 13- to…