The speech of two mothers to their infants at several points between three and eighteen months of age was analysed. Simplicity of the speech, as measured by MLU, was about the same at all ages, and none of the other features of the mothers' speech style showed any abrupt change at the time the children started to talk. The changes that did occur started much earlier, at about seven months. These findings are incompatible with the explanation that mothers speak simply and redundantly in response to cues of attention and comprehension from the child listener. It is suggested that the mothers interacted with their infants using a conversational model, and that the changes in the mothers' speech reflect their children's growing ability to function as conversational partners.

Language is conceptualized as a multi-dimensional entity which involves symbolic and cognitive aspects, communicative aspects, and structural-linguistic aspects, both syntactic and semantic. The child's task during acquisition is to become aware of, to understand, and to operate according to convention in these three spheres. Analysis of the single-word production of three children revealed developmental changes in the salience of the three aspects and individual differences in functional styles of language acquisition. Use of the multi-dimensional approach also revealed differences in the relations between language, overt action, and a child's tendency to talk about action. Many differences, particularly in communicative style, were related to differences in parent–child interaction.

Data are presented which reflect a particular strategy used by a boy from 1; 10 to 2; 2 to manage certain polysyllabic words. Analysis shows that substitution – although probably an impetus for this strategy – was not involved in most or even all of the strategic processes themselves. An interpretation is made in terms of ‘underlying forms’ (Ingram 1970); details of the strategy and its component sub-strategies (‘ruses’) are presented.

Parents employ a special register when speaking to young children, containing features that mark it as appropriate for children who are beginning to acquire their language. Parental speech in English to 5 children (ages 0; 9–1; 6) and in Spanish to 4 children (ages 0; 8–1; 1 and 1; 6–1; 10) was analysed for the presence and distribution of these features. Thirty-four paralinguistic, prosodic, and interactional features were identified, and rate measures and proportions indicated developmental patterns and differences across languages. Younger children received a higher rate of features that marked affect; older children were addressed with more features that marked semantically meaningful speech. English-speaking parents relied comparatively more on paralinguistic and affective features, whereas Spanish-speaking parents used comparatively more interactional features. Despite these differences, there was a high degree of similarity across parents and languages for the most frequently occurring features.

No reasonably successful theory of the acquisition of negation seems to have yet been proposed. Most studies describe post hoc what has taken place; but they fail to go on to suggest a theory that will predict what will take place. McNeill seems to be the only one to have explicitly aimed at a theory with at least a certain amount of predictive capacity, but his views leave much to be desired. This paper outlines an alternative proposal to cover four very early stages for the acquisition of negation systems in natural languages. It emphasizes the formal linguistic devices as the major variables that determine the various language-specific developmental sequences.

Kewley-Port & Preston (1974) reported that when words beginning with /d/ and /t/ were first observed (about 2; 0 for their subject E4), the characteristics of their voice onset time (VOT) distributions remained constant until at least 4; 6. The present investigation reports data for VOT for /d/ and /t/, from six children at average age 3; 0. Values for /d/ clearly achieve the short voicing lag category of adults, reported by Lisker & Abramson (1964, 1970, 1971). Values for /t/, however, are much more widely dispersed than adult values for /t/, although falling within the category long voicing lag.

Vol. 3, No. 3(October 1976), p. 441, ll. 11-12

ik was het (literally, ‘I was it’) should read ik was het (literally, ‘I was me’)

Vol. 1, No. 2(November 1974), p. 333.

A reprint of W.F. Leopold's Bibligraphy of child language is in fact available, from AMS Press, 56 East 13th St., New York,N.Y. 10003.