Examined parental speech data demonstrating that linguistic input to children does not contain sufficient information to support unaided learning of the pronoun "one." Examined 18-month-olds' interpretation of sentences with a "one" substitution. Found that 18-month-olds have command of the syntax of "one." Because…

Presents methodological and factual analyses of children's use of imitative speech as a strategy in language acquisition. The impact of conversational interactions and picture-story books on the speech of one girl aged 20 to 32 months is demonstrated. Four methodological problem areas are analyzed. (Author/RH)

Child acquisition of Mandarin was studied with four middle class families from Taipei, Taiwan. The 2-year-olds were taped at home playing with their families. Two of the children were taped for short periods (7 hours and 9 hours), while the other two children were studied biweekly for 14 months, which resulted in 71 hours of transcribed child…

The processes by which the young child recognizes and regenerates some invariant and organizational properties of language are discussed. In these processes the child conjoins and contrasts recurrent segments--perhaps a recurrent word--of the messages presented to him. After repeated exposure to messages containing a common segment, the child…