Describes a project being piloted in a nursery school in east London that offers the opportunity for children between 18 months and 3 years of age from multiethnic communities to learn English. The project encourages parent participation. Profiles one girl who is participating in the project, and suggests that the aims of the project are being…

Play, long seen as an outlet for unused physical and emotional energy, and as a way of learning adult roles, is also recognized for its role in language development in children. Through play, children gain the skill to use symbols and representation for things and events in the environment, providing the basis of their further use of language.…

The phonemic inventories of 30 children (aged 3;4-5;7) with phonological delays were examined in terms of featural distinctions to address universal vs. individual accounts of acquisition. Phonetic inventories of the same children were also identified for comparison purposes. (Contains 40 references.) (JL)

Examined the relationship between home literacy environment and child language ability for 323 4-year olds attending Head Start and their mothers or primary caregivers. Statistical analysis indicated that from 12-18.5% of the variance in child language scores was accounted for by the home literacy environment. (MDM)

This study compared the relative effectiveness of imitative intervention and conversational recast language intervention applied to grammatical morpheme and complex sentences in 21 children with specific language impairment. The conversational procedure was found to require fewer presentations to first spontaneous use and to produce more…

Acquisition of passive and active vocabulary in sign and oral language was analyzed in 2 children congenitally deaf, through age 54 months. Acquisition of sign occurred more quickly than oral language. Production of active nouns, function words, and "wh" question words in sign was equivalent to that of hearing peers, and was later transferred to…

Examination of the school records of 41 children (ages 3 to 18) identified as having higher functioning autistic disorder (H-F AD) indicated that subjects' characteristics (including cognitive, language, social, developmental, and medical) were as similar to those of children with learning disabilities as they were to other children diagnosed as…

Reviews five books: (1) "Language Acquisition: A Linguistic Introduction" (Helen Goodluck); (2) "Pathways to Number: Children's Developing Numerical Abilities" (Jacqueline Bideaud and others); (3) "The Collaborative Construction of Pretend" (Carolee Howes); (4) "The Role of Parents in the Development of Child's Peer Acceptance" (Maja Dekovic); and…

Discusses a new language curriculum model called the "merry-go-round model," which involves the use of levels rather than courses. By emphasizing skill acquisition rather than course completion, this system allows individual progression and groups students according to their level of skill development. Assessment in this program is…

Three children were observed interacting with their mothers before the onset of single words, when vocabulary consisted of 10 words, and when it consisted of 50 words. Relations between communicative functions and acoustic analysis of prosodic variables were studied. Considerable variability was found in the number of rises produced overall and…

Describes an ESL department's whole language approach to writing and reading, replacing its traditional grammar-based ESL instructional sequence. Reports the positive quantitative and qualitative results of the first three years of using the new approach. (KEH)

This study assessed children's visual recognition memory at seven months; their language development up to four years; and their intelligence up to five years. A greater preference for novelty in infancy was associated with later comprehension and expressive language and higher IQ scores. The relationship between novelty preference and IQ was…

Working class and upper-middle class mothers were videotaped interacting with their toddlers in four settings. Samples of the mothers' adult-directed speech were also collected. Observed were social class differences in the mothers' child-directed speech and some parallel differences in the mothers' adult-directed speech. This may reflect more…

In one experiment, children learned more about consonant blends at the onset than at the end of words. In a second experiment, children learned more about rhyming vowel-consonant blend sequences at the end of words than those at the beginning of words, where the vowel extended the onset. (BC)

A study of children's acquisition of synonymy as a sense-property during the second childhood period (as defined by Piaget) suggests that, contrary to psychologists' claims, nominal realism is a linguistic phenomenon that should be studied as such. (75 references) (Author/CB)