Investigates how language is acquired by children in a lower social class environment. Subjects were two children: a boy (1 year 8 months) and a girl (1 year, 5 months) living in Italy. (MP)

Discusses three perspectives (linguistic, philosophical, and psychological) which emphasize the points of agreement rather than disagreement among different versions of a conceptually based theory of word meaning acquisition. (JMB)

Examined the relation of language to thought in a cross-sectional study of 24 infants between 12 and 24 months of age. (Author/JMB)

A contextual history of the early word use of 2 children during the first year of language was compiled from 28 hours of videotaped mother-child interaction. (Author/JMB)

Various criteria are presented for selecting the first words to be taught to a child with a language disorder. (Author)

The use and function of imitation were examined for seven children in the early syntactic period of language acquisition, from 1-3 to 1-5 years old. (Author/SBH)

One hundred-twenty children (15 boys and 15 girls) ages 4-7 years, who exhibited normal language development, were tested using a story completion approach to study language development. (Author/MH)

The home environments of 74 infants were assessed when the infants were 6 and 24 months old. At three years of age their language development was measured. Results demonstrated that it is possible to specify some of the parameters of early experience related to certain aspects of language development. (Author/JMB)

Parental responses to grammatically correct and incorrect child utterances were observed in free-play interactions of two groups, each containing 10 parents and their language learning children. Group 1: 21-26 months old, with MLU's between 2 and 2.5 morphemes. Group 2: 34-40 months old, with MLU's between 3 and 3.5 morphemes. (Author/BN)

Used a combination of observational and experimental methods to assess young children's (aged 2 years, 11 months to 4 years, 9 months) comprehension of "if" and "because" expressions. Found significant increases in spontaneous "if" and "because" expressions between 3 and 4 years, and improvement on…

Two studies are presented that document the spontaneous development by normal infants of nonverbal gestures to symbolically represent objects, needs, states, and qualities. These gestures are shown to be a typical phenomenon of early development and to function in ways similar to early verbal symbols. (PCB)

Findings from studies exploring role of joint attentional focus in children's acquisition of language indicated that language of 24 mothers and their 15- to 21-month-olds inside episodes of joint attentional focus involved more utterances, shorter sentences, more comments, and longer conversations than outside of episodes. Also, object references…

Kim (1985) found that both English-speaking and Korean-speaking children find true negative sentences more difficult to verify than false negative sentences. A closer examination of the findings reveals that the difficulty is greater among Korean-speaking children. (Author/RH)

Replies to Akiyama's critique, pointing out areas of agreement between the Kim and Akiyama studies and areas of disagreement. Concludes that, contrary to Akiyama's argument, the Kim (1985) data would not directly challenge the cognition primacy hypothesis in any serious manner. (RH)