Analysis of the social exchanges of 33 toddlers with developmental disabilities showed that more of the observation time was spent socially with mothers than with peers, and the number of turns per exchange was longer with mothers. However, toddlers initiated more social exchanges with peers than with mothers. Few changes were exhibited over time.…

Discusses development of symbolic thinking in toddlers as a step in language acquisition and skill development. Examines means of encouraging this symbolic problem solving, such as setting the stage for problems, helping children plan problem-solving strategies, and encouraging children in self-evaluating their skills. Examines development of…

Grammatical development was examined for 10 children (ages 19 to 31 months) with expressive language impairments only and 10 children with both receptive- and expressive-language impairments. Group analyses did not reveal any differences between the subtypes on the Index of Productive Syntax. However, specific weakness in verb-phrase elaboration…

Reports a case study of a British 2-year old that shows a stage in syntactic development without a subject agreement protection but with a tense phrase. A sharp contrast in use of verb forms suggests that the child had left the Optional Infinitive stage and entered a transitional stage, where the major development is that the status of the bare…

Describes infant and toddler biting behavior as related to developmental differences in exploring the environment, learning cause-effect relationships, and using power to elicit a response. Discusses ways to deal with biting at each level, how to support parents dealing with the behavior at home, and the importance of taking biting related to…

Recorded home television viewing of 2-, 5-, 8-, 12-year olds, and adults on time-lapse videotapes over 10-day period. Found that cuts, movement, and overt purposeful character behavior were positively related to viewer's looking behavior, independent of child versus adult programming. Associations with looking behavior for other features depended…

Examined factors predicting parenting behavior of adolescent mothers of 24-month olds in a family-support program. Found that teens providing higher quality care had more positive childrearing beliefs, were less psychologically distressed, perceived their children as less irritable, and lived in higher quality neighborhoods than those providing…

Discusses lack of data on children with visual impairments and development of the National Plan for Training Personnel to Serve Children with Blindness and Low Vision (NPTP) to address personnel shortages and to conduct a needs assessment. The NPTP estimate of 93,000 students with visual impairments is analyzed. (CR)

Presents longitudinal case studies of the successive phonological acquisition of two Cantonese-English bilingual children, aged 2;3 to 3;1 years and 2;9 to 3; and 5 years. Children were assessed at four-week intervals. Phoneme-acquisition data and phonological process data revealed that both children had separate phonological systems for the two…

A study of 70 children found that hearing levels at 12-18 months were significantly associated with speech delay and low language outcomes at 3 years of age. Significant and substantial effects of hearing levels at 12-18 months on speech status at 3 years were significantly mediated by language status at 3 years. (Contains extensive references.)…

This article argues that the federal government will continue to shape the field of early intervention but in ways that differ from what has been seen in past years. Federal involvement in cross-state variability in eligibility, expected program outcomes, noncompliance, and directed research in perceived areas of need is discussed. (Contains…

Assessed long-term predictive validity of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories: Words and Sentences (CDI:WS) for children's expressive and receptive vocabulary development. Sixty-one New Zealand children were assessed with a New Zealand version of the CDI, and with the Expressive Vocabulary Test and Peabody Picture Vocabulary…

Describes short-form versions of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) and their development, summarizes newly available normative data and psychometric properties of the instruments, and discusses research and clinical applications. (Author/VWL)

Examined word retrieval in 14- to 24-month-olds. Found that children with limited productive vocabularies were less likely to produce labels of hidden objects than children with larger vocabularies, even though all could name them and did well when asked to find them. Pictorial cues facilitated word retrieval. Naming errors peaked among children…

Addresses the morphosyntactic development of two bilingual children and the issues raised by the controversy between the single system and the separate development hypotheses. Set within a generative grammar framework, evidence on German/English and Latvian/English is presented from the earliest stages of language development. (Author/VWL)