The ability of children between the ages of 2; o and 4; 8 to produce locative pre-or postpositions was investigated in English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, and Turkish. Across languages, there was a general order of development:(1) 'in', 'on', 'under', and 'beside', (2) 'between', 'back' and 'front' with featured objects, (3)' back' and' front' with non-featured objects. This order of development is discussed in terms of nonlinguistic growth in conceptual ability. Language-specific differences in the general pattern of development are discussed in terms of a number of linguistic factors which may facilitate or retard the child's discovery of the linguistic means for encoding concepts.

Students with language/learning impairment (LLI) and three groups of normally achieving children matched for chronological age, spoken language, and reading abilities wrote and told stories that were analyzed according to a three-dimensional language analysis system. Spoken narratives were linguistically superior to written narratives in many respects. The content of written narratives, however, was organized differently than the content of spoken narratives. Spoken narratives contained more local interconnections than global interconnections; the opposite was true for written narratives. LLI and reading-matched children evidenced speaking-writing relationships that differed from those of the age- and language-matched children in the way language form was organized. Further, LLI children produced more grammatically unacceptable complex T-units in their spoken and written stories than students from any of the three matched groups. The discussion focuses on mechanisms underlying the development of speaking-writing differences and ramifications of spoken-language impairment for spoken and written-language relationships.

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Sporadic observations of non-Western culture groups have made it clear that the large literature on child-directed talk primarily describes Western parent-child interaction patterns. The current study used a survey instrument to contrast the childrearing beliefs and related verbal interaction practices of Chinese and Western mothers of preschoolers. Stepwise regression procedures indicated that culture differences in ratings for 6 belief statements and 5 interaction patterns accounted for 66-67% of the total variance. Discriminate functions derived from the regression analyses identified members of the two culture groups with 94-95% accuracy. The findings call into question the advice commonly given to parents of children with language delay and point to specific areas where practices more harmonious with Chinese culture could be recommended.