Critical Influences on Child Language Acquisition and Development

The book identifies and assesses the importance of a range of influences on child language acquisition and development, paying particular attention to situational influences. Key issues are highlighted and recent research is succinctly presented. There are five sections: the deployment of speech during early development; linguistic interaction and family background: encoding the situation; multidimentional aspects of language development; and constraints on language development. There are twelve chapters on these themes contributed by leading researchers in this area.

Inhalt
Preface; C.E.Snow - Notes on Contributors - Introduction; D.Messer & G.Turner - PART 1: THE DEPLOYMENT OF SPEECH DURING EARLY DEVELOPMENT - The Relationship of Maternal Speech to Children's First Words; M.Harris - Is Early Speech Situational? An Examination of some Current Theories about the Relation of Early Utterances to the Context; A.Ninio - Affording Social-cognitive Skills in Young Children: the Overhearing Context; M.A.Forrester - PART 2: LINGUISTIC INTERACTION AND FAMILY BACKGROUND - Initial Production of Inflections in Bilingual Children; T.Klausen, M.S.Subritzky & M.Hayashi - Social Class, Maternal Speech and the Child's Semantic Orientation; G.J.Turner - PART 3: SITUATIONAL INFLUENCES ON GRAMMAR - Critical Influences on the Acquisition of Verb Transitivity; R.Ingham - Do Young Children use Definite Expressions for Specific References?; R.J.Stevenson & K.M.Sims - PART 4: MULTIDIMENSIONAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE - Children's Comprehension and Production of Locative Expressions; M.L.Donaldson & K.Laing - Intonation and Function of Four Year Old's Tag Constructions; B.Lloyd & R.Goodwin - PART 5: CONSTRAINTS ON LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT - Phonological Processes and Sign Language Development; J.Clibbens & M.Harris - Increasing Metalinguistic Awareness to assist Phonological Change; J.Howell, A.Hill, E.Dean & D.Waters - The Nature of the Linguistic and Communication Difficulties of Children with Atuism; R.Jordan - Bibliography - Index