The study (with eight adults and eight children at each of the ages three, four, five and seven years) found that children initially organize their speech gestures over a domain at least the size of the syllable and only gradually differentiate the syllable into patterns of gestures more closely aligned with its perceived segmental components.…

The study examined whether children with normal linguistic skills demonstrate increasing developmental changes in their perception of place of articulation for stop consonants with short- and long-duration formant transitions. Children's improving discrimination abilities did not reach adult levels even at 10 years of age. (Author/DB)

Investigated the interpretation of the word "big" by 40 children of 3 to 5 years. The type and orientation of objects used in the study were varied. Results demonstrated that contextual factors influenced children's responses. (RJC)

Assessment of two-year-olds' (N=22) acquisition of words for referents of previously learned words indicated that young children found it easier to learn a new word when they were able to contrast its referent with that of a word they already knew. (Author/CB)

Suggests that storytelling in the early childhood classroom is an excellent technique for fostering growth in language. Notes that the exposure to book language that a child receives through storytelling is related to reading development. (MG)

Twenty severely/profoundly hearing-impaired children, aged three-six, interacted with the investigator while playing with toys. A significant relationship was found between imaginative play and language development. No relationship was found between imaginative play and chronological age. Correspondences were found between language development and…

Considers some of the claims for learnability principles that have been proposed within the first language context and the problems associated with their application to second language acquisition. A discussion of the ways research on learnability in second language acquisition can contribute to further development of learnability theory is…

Describes SCISOR (System for Conceptual Information Summarization, Organization and Retrieval), a prototype intelligent information retrieval system that extracts useful information from large bodies of text. It overcomes limitations of linguistic coverage by applying a text processing strategy that is tolerant of unknown words and gaps in…

Examines the ability of 140 children of 3-5 years to use functional standards to judge size. The ability to use nonegocentric functional standards was present by age 3. However, 3-year-olds performed above chance only when their attention was directed to the relevant function. (RJC)

The article reviews studies showing that speech and language intervention during the period of cannulation can benefit tracheostomized and ventilator-dependent children by improving their communicative functioning while decreasing their frustration with the tracheostomy placement. Therapeutic interventions with feeding skills are also recommended.…

When 16 parents' and 13 nonparents' conversations with children were examined for evidence of adults' differential responses to children's syntactic, phonological, and semantic errors, results indicated that adults tended to respond differentially to children's language mistakes, with parents showing greater sensitivity than non-parents. (RH)

Longitudinal studies of the application of a paraphrasing model to 18- to 28-month-olds indicated that mean length of utterance was significantly correlated with realized and paraphrased frequencies of several linguistic items in the subjects' corpora. The model was productive for examining children's corpora of speech and the linguistic…

Highlights Froebel's ideas on areas such as math, language, art, and science education, and provides a bibliography of his writings on the kindergarten movement and on teacher training. Discusses these ideas in the context of the controversial journal "Child Life." Provides a brief history of the journal. (JW)

Observed mothers playing with their 40-month-old children and eliciting their children's memories of shared experiences. Cluster analysis found two distinct maternal interaction styles in each of these contexts. Individual mothers' styles varied across the contexts, suggesting that infant-mother dyads must be observed in multiple contexts to…

The medieval writer, the nun Hildegard von Bingen, learned Latin without any formal instruction in it. Her case is described as an example of language acquisition by hearing it read, sung, and expounded and by visualizing it as though it were written down in a kind of phonetic script. (21 references) (Author/LB)