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.

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The study focuses on the language abilities of 30 20-month-old children, using data from two sources: a detailed maternal interview and 90 minutes of videotaped observation. Observed language was coded into the categories used for the interview. Production and comprehension at 28 months (MLU, PPVT and morphology comprehension) were also assessed. Observation and interview data at 20 months were highly intercorrelated. Cluster analyses of both data sets yielded referential, grammatical morpheme and dialogue clusters, providing partial support for the nominal/pronominal and referential/expressive acquisition styles reported in the literature. However, the referential and grammatical morpheme clusters were highly correlated, suggesting that two acquisition strategies are developing in parallel. Only for those children who heavily emphasize one strategy can one speak of a distinctive style. All interview and observation clusters predicted 28-months MLU, but the grammatical morpheme clusters did not predict later performance on a Grammatical Morpheme Test. It is tentatively suggested that holistic processing strategies underlie the pronominal/expressive style.

In cases of child maltreatment, children are required to recount past experiences in pretrial interviews, courtroom examination, and abuse-focused therapy. Yet their descriptions are often insufficient for risk assessment, legal decision making, and treatment planning. In the present study, we test whether a new procedure—narrative elaboration—facilitates children's recall without jeopardizing accuracy. Thirty-three second graders participated in a classroom activity. Two weeks later, they were randomly assigned to participate in one of two preparation sessions before being interviewed about the classroom activity: (a) narrative elaboration intervention or (b) control session. The interviewer was an unfamiliar authority figure. The interview entailed free recall (e.g., “What happened?”), cued recall (i.e., an opportunity to elaborate on free recall with visual cues), and follow-up questions. On the cued recall task, children prepared with the narrative elaboration procedure reported significantly more correct information than children in the control group. Performance was improved without increasing error or reducing correct responses to follow-up questions. The implications of these results for questioning suspected child abuse victims are discussed.

In this study, the word retrieval, phonological awareness, sentence completion, and narrative discourse processing skills of 93 reading-disabled and 93 normally achieving subjects from 8 to 14 years of age were compared. The subjects were matched for age, sex, and neighborhood. Results revealed that the two groups differed significantly on the time and accuracy of word retrieval, their ability to produce a syntactically appropriate structure in a sentence completion task, their retelling of stories that had been read to them, their answers to questions about the stories, and their inferences. Further analysis revealed that the variance in the younger reading-disabled children’s reading comprehension scores was best accounted for by their performance on the sentence completion and word retrieval measures; the inferencing skills of the older reading-disabled children best accounted for the variance in their reading comprehension. By contrast, the younger normally achieving children’s reading comprehension scores were best accounted for by their sentence completion, the proportion of the stories that they retold, and word retrieval scores. The proportion of stories retold and the phonological awareness score of the older normally achieving children best accounted for the variance in their reading scores. These findings suggest that the oral language skills of normally achieving and reading-disabled children may relate differently to their reading comprehension at different age levels.