Between their second and fifth years, young children learn approximately 15 new words a day. For every word the child hears, he or she must choose the correct referent out of an infinite set of candidates. An important problem for developmental psychologists is to understand the principles that limit the child's hypotheses about word meanings. A…

A discussion of the connectionist approach to language looks at the nature of language, language processing, and language acquisition. Language processing is seen as a means of satisfying the linguistic constraints of comprehension and production, and is also viewed as a process that operates with other aspects of cognition and involves mutually…

An interactive videodisc program at the California School for the Deaf, Riverside, has been used to motivate language and reading experiences and increase communication skills. Improvement in hardware and software design over the course of the project period is noted and described. An authoring system has been developed which allows teaching…

The paper examines the use of concrete symbol systems to make the transition from presymbolic to formal symbolic communication for deaf blind students. Comments focus on expressive use of concrete symbols and address two issues requiring further research: (1) the critical features of referent objects, concrete symbols, and concrete symbol arrays…

This paper examines the communication of autistic individuals and describes a speech therapy approach based on a view of speech as an archetypal reality, and suggests that the archetypal nature of speech manifests itself in autistic persons and that drumming or chanting can release the inner flow. Intervention techniques were used to create…

The purposes of this study were to investigate (1) the level of development of four target vocal and gestural symbols (Doggie, Cup, Car, and Fiffin, a novel concept), and (2) the relationship of symbolic maturity to the use of symbols in combinations. Thirty infants (15 boys and 15 girls), between 82 and 91 weeks of age, were observed for…

The Natural Approach to teaching second language communication skills is described. The Natural Approach is based on the proposition that acquirers in natural situations go through three stages: comprehension, early speech, and speech emergence. Provision of comprehensible input allows beginning learners to teach themselves how to speak. Thus,…

Discoveries about the acquisition of American Sign Language (ASL) by deaf children are reviewed. Current research shows that ASL has developed as a fully autonomous language with complex organizational properties not derived from spoken language. Like spoken languages, ASL exhibits formal structuring at two levels and similar organizational…

The development of devices used to coin agent and instrument nouns in Hebrew was investigated among 60 children aged 3, 4, 5, 7, and 11. The prevalent word-formation device in Hebrew is the triconsonantal root combined with vowel patterns. Other available devices include suffixation, conversion, and compounding. Questions designed to elicit…

The basis for acquisition of categories in child language was investigated. The early encoding of the distinction between mass and count nouns was examined to determine whether children categorize them on the basis of semantic type or syntactic regularities. An experiment was designed in which semantic and syntactic cues were in competition:…

Children's acquisition of agent nouns within a framework of morphological structural principles is explored. Language acquisition has been conceptualized as a process of parameter setting in which the learner is richly endowed with a vocabulary of primitives and rule schemata. Exposure to the primary data will be filled in from the range of…

The evidence on the acquisition of intonation by children is reviewed. Reports on the early use of pitch contours fall into two categories, imitational and differential intonation. While imitational intonation is based on mimicry of adults, differential intonation involves the acquisition of two or three tunes that contrast in meaning from an…

Reading readiness activities should lead to awareness and skills that will bring a child to a point on the reading acquisition continuum where he or she will be ready to benefit from more rigorous and formally structured activities in the classroom. Children's awareness of the following five aspects of language and literacy are helpful, if not…

Five deaf infants with hearing parents enrolled in a parent-infant intervention program using total communication were videotaped during free play sessions with their parents. Videotapes of each child at program entry and program exit were analyzed. The functions of children's gestures, pointing responses, communicative vocalizations, and signs…

Three groups of teachers (10 regular teachers talking to 10 normally hearing students, 10 teachers of the deaf using oral communication to oral deaf children, and teachers of the deaf talking and signing with children taught through a manually coded English system) were videotaped in spontaneous conversation and a storytelling task. Children were…