Two transitional phases in the child's early language development are described; the first occurs between prelinguistic vocalization and one-word speech and the second between one-word and patterned speech. Cognitive, linguistic and affective inputs to the acquisition of reference and syntax are discussed in the light of the transitional phenomena that were found. We claim that each major linguistic stage is preceded by a transitional phase which serves as a bridging device for the next major acquisition; that sound and meaning develop partly independently in language development; and that the child's earliest patterned speech is not organized in terms of knowledge of grammatical categories, but in terms of more fundamental coordinations of conceptual meanings with phonetic outputs. A theoretical framework is proposed which provides a more systematic treatment of transitional phenomena than has previously been provided. The framework allows for interpretations of transitional phenomena and of their relations to the milestone periods of early language development.

The use and function of imitation were examined for seven children in the early syntactic period of language acquisition. The use of imitation was determined by the percent of syntactic imitation out of total syntactic output. Based on this measure, the children were divided according to whether they used imitations minimally, moderately, or extensively. The function of imitative repertoires was investigated by examining the lexical, syntactic, semantic, and communicative-interactional aspects of language as they were reflected in imitation. The analyses revealed that degree of imitation interacted with function of imitation in the acquisition process. Management implications are discussed.

In this longitudinal investigation of the emerging grammar of seven children, differences in linguistic acquisition were observed. The syntactic analyses applied to the corpora included examination of emerging complexity, observance of word order constraints and subject-predicate specification among others. These analyses revealed two distinct styles of syntactic acquisition. These linguistic styles appeared to be sex- and speed-related with specific ties to particular utterance types and grammatical-relational specification. The observed styles of syntactic acquisition were differentiated by these differences so that the differences themselves constituted the style characteristics.

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