This article discusses the use of play as a medium for extending and enriching the communication exchanges and symbolic language of children with autism. It provides a case illustration of how an adult-facilitated dramatic peer play led to a breakthrough in symbolic behaviors in a 9-year-old girl with autism. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

We join other responders in thanking Clahsen and Felser (CF) for pulling together these observations about the development of language processing. We are especially impressed by the generality and inclusiveness of CF's treatment of development in L1 and L2. Because most of their specifics concerned comprehension processes, our contribution will…

The assessment of nonword repetition in children goes back at least to 1974, when the Goldman-Fristoe-Woodcock Auditory Skills Battery was published, including a subtest (Sound Mimicry) assessing nonword repetition (Goldman, Fristoe, & Woodcock, 1974). Nevertheless, it was not until 20 years later, when Gathercole and Baddeley (1990) reported a…

This paper describes a collaborative action-research project initiated by two professors of multilingual = multicultural education at a large US university, whose goal was to update a required first-semester graduate course in a bilingual/second language teacher-education programme and to adapt it to the needs of students and schools faced with…

This paper investigates how people resolve syntactic category ambiguities when comprehending sentences. It is proposed that people combine: (a) context-dependent syntactic expectations (top-down statistical information) and (b) context-independent lexical-category frequencies of words (bottom-up statistical information) in order to resolve…

A striking demonstration that sound-object correspondences are not completely arbitrary is that adults map nonsense words with rounded vowels (e.g. bouba) to rounded shapes and nonsense words with unrounded vowels (e.g. kiki) to angular shapes (Kohler, 1947; Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001). Here we tested the bouba/kiki phenomenon in 2.5-year-old…

According to a developmental model of figurative language acquisition--the "global elaboration model" (Levorato & Cacciari, 1995)--the metalinguistic awareness necessary to use figurative language in a creative way is acquired late, and is subsequent to the ability to comprehend and produce figurative expressions. One hundred and…

Theorists of language acquisition have long debated the means by which children learn the argument structure of verbs (e.g. Bowerman, 1974, 1990; Pinker, 1984, 1989; Tomasello, 1992). Central to this controversy has been the possible role of verb semantics, especially in learning which verbs undergo dative-shift alternation in languages like…

This research explores the role of phonotactic probability in two-year-olds' production of coda consonants. Twenty-nine children were asked to repeat CVC non-words that were used as labels for pictures of imaginary animals. The CVC non-words were controlled for their phonotactic probabilities, neighbourhood densities, word-likelihood ratings, and…

This research addresses the question of why some children are disposed to making a large number of pronoun case errors and others are not. The answer proposed is that when pronoun paradigm building outstrips the development of INFL, children become especially vulnerable to erring in the choice of pronominal word form, resulting in pronoun case…

This study compares homonym learning to novel word learning by three- to four-year-old children to determine whether homonyms are learned more rapidly or more slowly than novel words. In addition, the role of form characteristics in homonym learning is examined by manipulating phonotactic probability and word frequency. Thirty-two children were…

There are reasons to believe that infant-directed (ID) speech may make language acquisition easier for infants. However, the effects of ID speech on infants' learning remain poorly understood. The experiments reported here assess whether ID speech facilitates word segmentation from fluent speech. One group of infants heard a set of nonsense…

Toddlers' symbolic understanding of iconic models was assessed through 2 comprehension-based tasks: 1 based on looking and 1 requiring manual selection of the target object. Toddlers received either iconic models or photographs of models as the symbolic referent. Overall, 18-month-olds performed poorly, and both 22- and 26-month-olds performed…

Psycholinguistic research has shown that the influence of abstract syntactic knowledge on performance is shaped by particular sentences that have been experienced. To explore this idea, the authors applied a connectionist model of sentence production to the development and use of abstract syntax. The model makes use of (a) error-based learning to…

Language is a great communication system. Through language, humans can express logical reasoning, grief, happiness, wishes, descriptions, and a rich array of feelings and ideas. Every baby deserves the gift of language power! In this article, the author discusses how babies build language skills and presents activities to help babies build…