Discusses explanations regarding bilingual children's codemixing, including that it is influenced by the particular discourse strategies parents use in conversation with their children. Five French-English bilingual families in Montreal were examined for parental style of response, children's rates of codemixing, and effects of responses on…

Evaluated changes in mothers' interactive behaviors with infants from 6 to 40 months who were medically high risk, medically low risk, very low birthweight preterm, or full-term. Found that variations in mothers' responses to children's changing capabilities predicted rates of change in children's social skills. (Author/KB)

This study compared verbal comprehension, verbal production, and gesture production in 40 children (ages 10-49 months) with Down Syndrome (DS) and 40 normally developing children (ages 8-17 months). DS children showed a dissociation between verbal comprehension and production but synchronous development between vocal lexical comprehension and…

This study examined whether maternal responsivity would predict the extent to which prelinguistic milieu teaching (PMT) facilitated generalized intentional communication better than a contrast small-group treatment with 58 children (ages 17 to 36 months) with developmental disabilities. If mothers were relatively responsive before treatment, PMT…

This study compared the language skills of low-birth-weight premature infants (N=11), higher birth-weight premature infants (N=14), and full-term infants (N=12) at 22 months corrected chronological age. Results suggest that low-birth-weight premature infants are at greater risk than higher birth-weight premature infants for speech and language…

This study used longitudinal productivity criteria to establish the phonetic skill of 20 children (followed from 9 to 16 months). The number of specific consonants produced consistently across the months predicted referential lexical use at 16 months. Prior use of at least two supraglottal consonants characterized the children achieving…

Fifty-eight prelinguistic children with developmental disabilities and their mothers participated in an experimental test of whether intentional communication elicits maternal responses purported to facilitate language development. Results indicated that treatment effects on maternal responses varied by pre-treatment maternal education level and…

Comparison of spontaneous language samples of 30 toddlers diagnosed with specific expressive language impairment (SLI) and language samples of typically developing toddlers found the SLI toddlers vocalized significantly less often, had proportionately smaller consonantal and vowel inventories, and used a more restricted and less mature array of…

Comparison of 18 mothers and their late-talking male toddlers with 18 mothers and their typically developing male toddlers found no significant differences in degree of synchrony between mothers and children, mothers' use of social cues, play synchrony, compliance, or overall communicativeness, although the late talkers made significantly fewer…

This study tested the hypothesis that there is a developmental shift in the perceptual weighting of acoustic parameters that results from experience with a native language. Comparison of 17 3-year olds and 16 adults found that age-related differences in auditory sensitivity did not fully account for age-related differences in perceptual weighting…

Interviewed 13- to 34-months olds about their trauma injury within days and after 6, 12, and 18 or 24 months. Found that the youngest demonstrated little verbal recall. Some who could not narrate about past events at time of injury could verbally recall target words 18 months later. Most of the oldest children demonstrated good verbal recall 2…

Examined European- and Hispanic-American mothers' multimodal communication to their 5- to 30-month-olds while they taught the children target words by using distinct objects during play. Found that mothers used target words more often than nontarget words in synchrony with object motion and sometimes touch, and tailored communication to infants'…

The influence of presurgical infant orthopedic treatment (PIO) on speech intelligibility was evaluated with 10 toddlers who used PIO during the first year of life and 10 who did not. Treated children were rated as exhibiting greater intelligibility, however, transcription data indicated there were not group differences in actual intelligibility.…

Recommends play activities in which children look, listen, taste, smell, and touch. Includes appropriate ages for activities and gives directions for several games, including peek and seek, water play, bean bags, and hot potato. (DLH)

Reports the findings of a cross-sectional study that investigated the acquisition of relative clauses by 27 Tamil-speaking children who ranged in age from 2 years and 11 months to 6 years and 6 months. A picture-cued production task was used to elicit relative clauses from the child subjects. (Author/VWL)