Onset of canonical babbling was investigated for 1,536 high-risk infants at about 10-months corrected age. Although delays were infrequent, they were often associated with genetic, neurological, anatomical, and/or physiological abnormalities. Over half the cases of late canonical babbling, at the time of discovery, were not associated with prior…

An evaluation of 3,469 infants at risk found that of those who showed late onset of canonical babbling, fewer than half had been diagnosed with a medical problem accounting for the delay. A follow-up study found those with delayed canonical babbling had smaller vocabularies at 18, 24, and 30 months. (Author/CR)

Examines three alternatives to the classical framework of early cognitive development: modularity-nativism, connectionism, and theory-theory. Arguments are marshaled to support the "theory-theory" view, which emphasizes a combination of innate structure and qualitative reorganization in children's thought based on input from the people and things…

Six children were studied from the age of 6 months to 1 year and 6 months to chart their developing comprehension vocabularies from the first to the 100th word. Observational data were used in the first instance to identify newly comprehended words and then controlled testing was carried out for each word to confirm and expand the observational…

Assessments of a 6-year-old Spanish monolingual and 5-year-old bilingual children included a home-language survey, parents' and teachers' ratings, cartoon conservation scales, and standardized tests. Nonverbal cognitive development was shown to influence language acquisition. Cultural and linguistic factors affected children differently. (SK)

Critically examines the traditional notion of American Sign Language/English bilingualism. This model is contrasted with the "ASL/English as a spoken language" bilingual model in which the modality constraints facing the deaf child are presented as the fundamental issue for ASL/English bilingualism. Empirical and applied research supporting the…

Assessed the amount of linguistic information needed by 2-year-old infants to recognize whether or not a sentence belongs to their native language. A cross-linguistic study of French and American 2-month-old infants was conducted, measuring the latency of the first ocular saccade toward a loudspeaker playing short French and English utterances.…

Examined the relationships between young children's language ability and their home or day care play environments. Found that mother-child interaction pattern was the best predictor of children's language abilities, even though teachers and day care mothers engaged in better quality interactions than did home care mothers. Aspects of home…

Four experimental studies were designed to test, in Norwegian, the hypothesis that children's non-adultlike interpretations of pronouns may be partly attributable to a lexical factor interacting with the A-Chain Condition. (Author/VWL)

This article presents a five-step sequence for teaching children with disabilities to read pictures. Steps are sequenced for content and complexity of picture, student response requirement, and language demands. They include: (1) identify person, (2) identify object, (3) identify person and object, (4) identify action, and (5) identify sequence.…

Notes that Davidson's book provides an in-depth exploration of the contribution of dramatic play to emergent literacy and ways that teachers can implement play-based literacy learning. Maintains that the book has a balanced theoretical orientation, provides a sensitive treatment of intervention, presents a thoughtful treatment of oral and written…

Argues for novel conceptualization of the learning process in language acquisition. According to this proposal, the learning procedure is neither purely lexical learning nor purely inductive rule-formation, but rather a hybrid of the two. Investigated the first intransitive verbs to participate in multiword combinations in a longitudinal study of…

Examines development of verb structures in the multiword combinations of two Korean learners, starting from 15 months of age when both children produced their first word combination. (Author/VWL)

Describes a pilot study that aimed at gaining insights into how language learners benefit from training in interlingual subtitling. The study showed that students' communication competence in both their first and second language improved while they simultaneously mastered transferable skills. (Author/VWL)

Stresses the importance of early musical experiences for children to assist in their musical development. Addresses how a child's home environment affects their musical development, the similarities between language acquisition and musical development, and the role parents and teachers have in developing young children's musical abilities. (CMK)