The late babbling productions of a French child are analysed and compared with a similar study of English-speaking children. English-speaking and French children are shown to share such universal phonetic preferences as cluster reduction, final devoicing, etc. However, there are also noticeable differences which may be ascribed to corresponding differences in the target language. Thus a selective, language-specific, phonetic acquisition has been taking place during the babbling stage. A comparison of the phonetic repertoires of French, English, Thai and the late babbling corpus confirmed the close similarity between the latter and French. This study reinforces the view that babbling is relevant to the study of linguistic performance.

The temporal organization of the late babbling of a French child during the pivotal period between babbling and the production of meaningful utterances is studied. Two points are analysed: the segmental timing in terms of syllabic durations and the durations of sequences according to their intonational contours. Articulation rate in late babbling is fairly rapid and stable and does not vary with length of sequences. However, at the end of the period studied, longer durations are found for bi- and tri-syllabic sequences. This lengthening can be seen to reflect changes in the child's target programming and the constraints on co-articulation that it implies. Additional changes occur also as a function of intonational contours.

The relationship between language development and the development of non-verbal representation was studied longitudinally in six children. Language development is evaluated interactionally by considering not only the form and usage of a child's sounds but also the way a familiar person allows those sounds to function as instances of words belonging to the frequently revised language proper to the child–adult pair. Non-verbal representation, studied in a symbolic play situation, presents different behavioural levels, showing close synchrony with a large increase observed in language development. The results are taken as suggestive of an inter-relational hypothesis between language and non-verbal representation, and an interpretation in terms of reciprocal interaction is proposed.

Investigators have targeted the onset of reference in children at varying points on the developmental continuum. Their viewpoints seem to be related to issues of the contextual flexibility, content and composition of the lexicon in comprehension and production. This study considered all of the variables in the early vocabularies of 32 children with a mean age of 1; 1·7. An intensive maternal interview was used to obtain data on the words comprehended and produced by the children and the contexts which supported their interpretation and use. The findings pointed to a relative independence between the domains of comprehension and production. Vocabulary size was related to all contextually flexible items in production while only related to the contextually flexible predicates in comprehension. Further, there was evidence for an early version of the referential style that has been reported at later stages of development.

Mother and child speech in two half-hour free play conversations of six pairs were analysed for 15 semantic roles such as AGENT and ACTION, and five additional syntactic categories such as negation. Children were taped at the beginning of word combinations (1; 7–2; 0) and again 3 to 6 months later. Mothers and children were similar to one another in the relative frequency with which they used the different semantic and syntactic categories. However, the mothers' use was stable, including a larger number of categories than the children and showing few shifts in relative frequency. Insofar as changes took place over time, it was the children who changed to become more like their mothers, both in the semantic roles present and in their relative frequency of use. These findings are interpreted as evidence against a Fine-Tuning Hypothesis to explain the content of mothers' speech to children. The role of discourse topic restrictions in limiting the distribution of semantic roles is discussed.

The study considers implications of our findings regarding pre-school acquisition of Hebrew inflectional morphology (Berman 1981). Children resolve ‘opacities’ by reference to various types of ‘paradigms’. These are related to the distinction between transient and more widespread deviations from prescriptive norms, in an attempt to account for interactions between child language and language change. While pre-school acquisition is crucially affected by peer input, the grammar is subsequently reshaped by orthography and by formal study, yielding a complex interaction between concrete vs. abstract bases of Hebrew linguistic competence. Further research is needed to examine when and how the peculiarly Semitic constructs of consonantal root plus morphological pattern are acquired.

Cambridge University Press apologises for an error in its advertisement in Volume 8, No. 2. The title of Alison Elliot's book is Child Language.