The purpose of this study was to determine (1) whether mothers simplify their speech during the second half of the first year of development when infants begin to comprehend words and use gestures to communicate intentionally, and (2) whether individual differences in mothers' speech adjustments influence their infants' later language acquisition. The subjects for the study were 14 mother-infant pairs from a medically low risk sample who were followed longitudinally. Mothers' mean length of utterance (MLU) was calculated from transcripts of face-to-face interaction when the infants were 0;3, 0;6, and 0;9 in age. Mothers who provided responsive and stimulating environments, as indicated by HOME scores, also reduced their MLU over the age range studied. Moreover, mothers' MLU adjustments during the first year were more predictive than the HOME scale in forecasting receptive language development at 1; 6. In contrast, expressive language abilities at 1; 6 were unrelated to the environmental variables measured but were predicted by child characteristics such as the infant's sex. These results suggest that a mother's ability to ‘fine-tune’ her early linguistic input may be predictive of her child's later receptive language functioning. Precursors of fine-tuning, such as maternal beliefs in reciprocity and infant object orientation, are discussed.

Disorders in ChildrenThis study compares expressive language samples from normal children ( n = 20) and language impaired children ( n = 9), matched for age and intellectual capacity, across a range of grammatical and lexical dimensions. The aims of the inquiry are to determine if it is possible to characterize language impairment (so far as it pertains to the carefully selected group of children in this study) using such dimensions, and in particular to see if the identification can be made on the basis of a subset of the large set of categories used in the original descriptive framework. An initial comparison of incidence scores based on samples of 200 utterances from each child, for 65 grammatical and lexical categories, indicates that only a third of the categories are relevant to the characterization of impairment. A discriminant function analysis using a subset of these caregories identified two variables, which, taken together, were reasonably successful in discriminating the two groups. The categories identified relate to verb premodification and inflection, and lexical verb type frequency. The implications of these findings are discussed.The question of what constitutes language impairment in children is still an open one, despite a decade or more of intensive discussion concerning both the typological features of the output of the languageimpaired, and the aetiology of language impairment (see Leonard, 1979; and Bishop, 1984, for discussion of the issues). As the longterm aim of our research is the construction of a valid diagnostic assessment procedure for use in clinical contexts, it is obviously important for us to be able to determine those features of the impaired child's language output which distinguish him from the normal child. In this study we readdress this typological issue. Since two of the major difficulties in resolving this issue are subject selection and the variety of descriptive frameworks available for linguistic data analysis, we have paid particular attention to the definition of our language-impaired group, and to the selection of a framework for analysis. The selection of subjects was made according to a detailed set of criteria which are described below in the method section (see for comparison Stark and Tallal, 1981). For the linguistic analysis we

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