Early linguistic environment has shown an impact on children's later language development, particularly, child directed speech has been associated with providing children with linguistic input from which to look for regularities and patterns, and boosting children to produce utterances beyond their current competence. This article aims to examine…

Across a diverse range of languages, children proceed through similar stages in their production of causal language: their initial verbs lack internal causal structure, followed by a period during which they produce causative overgeneralizations, indicating knowledge of a productive causative rule. We asked in this study whether a child not…

Previously published corpora of two-word utterances by three chimpanzees and three human children were compared to determine whether, as has been claimed, apes possess the same basic syntactic and semantic capacities as 2-year old children. Some similarities were observed in the type of semantic relations expressed by the two groups; however,…

Children, like adults, use referring expressions to refer to specific objects, events, or people. Research has provided insights into how children use referring expressions and the appearance of forms developmentally (Radford, 1990; Abu-Akel, et al., 2004; Pine & Lieven, 1997). This study examined how three, four, and five year-old children…

The article examines normal language and communication development to provide insights into what parents of hearing impaired children can expect from and do for their children. Findings of particular importance for facilitating linguistic growth in hearing impaired children are discussed. (DLS)

This article examines child acquisition of syntax through a chronological distributional analysis. The main point is that the development of syntactic relations is neither behaviorist nor pre-programmed but dynamic, and that therefore child linguistic development cannot be described in terms of an innate adult language ideal. (Text is in French.)…

Three questions were asked that explored the linguistic fine-tuning hypothesis and how parents might model language: (i) do parents significantly tune to their children's productive language or non-verbal cognition during play? (ii) is the level of the linguistic tuning different in the Down syndrome (DS) population compared to a typically…

A framework which considers speech and language as separate entities in a symbiotic relationship is presented, and basic questions are raised concerning how speech and language function together and what their reciprocal effects are. Based on the notion that speech and language are independent, various examples of speech without language and of…

The inductivist model of language acquisition was tested by comparing the linguistic development of impulsive kindergarten children with that of reflective children, who, in general, make fewer errors on inductive reasoning tasks. The 81 children sampled were tested with the Matching Familiar Figures Test and with measures of syntactic and…

This book reports the proceedings of the conference on the role of speech in language, the fifth conference in the "Communicating by Language" Series, sponsored by the Growth and Development Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The focus of the first group of papers is on the development of speech in man and…

This volume contains six essays on both theory and practical learning techniques for second language learning. In "Towards a Synthesization of Teaching Methodologies for TESOL," James W. Ney discusses synthesizing the audio-lingual approach and the cognitive-code theory of language learning. In "Should We Teach Children…