This paper is concerned with the strategies used by deaf mothers to ensure that their deaf infants are able to perceive both the signs addressed to them and the nonverbal contexts to which these signs relate. Four mother-child pairs were studied and observations were made when the children were aged between 7 and 20 months. A detailed analysis of the relationship between the mother's signing, the child's pattern of attention, and the nonverbal context of the signing revealed that a high proportion of signs were seen by the children and that, by 20 months of age, the majority of signs also had a nonverbal context which was salient for the child. There were general similarities in the pattern of strategies employed by the mothers to relate their signs to the nonverbal context but there were also interesting differences. The possible relationship of these differences to the children's sign language development is discussed in the light of the children's own sign production at two years of age.

Six children were visited in their homes every two weeks for 18 months from the age of six months in order to observe their developing comprehension and production of words. Controlled testing of the children's developing vocabulary was also carried out to provide a more detailed picture of the precise context in which a word was understood or produced. The results showed both similarities and individual differences among the children in patterns of early comprehension. For all six children there was a very close relationship between early production and comprehension of words: words that were contextually flexible in production tended also to be so in comprehension and words that were context-bound also tended to be so in both modalities although there was some evidence that the two types of word differed in the extent to which comprehension preceded production. All children were also similar in showing evidence of contextually flexible comprehension very early on. However, there were individual differences both in the rate at which comprehension developed and in the lag between comprehension and production. The significance of this pattern of development for accounts of lexical development is explored.

1991). Early lexical development and maternal speech: a comparison of children's initial and subsequent uses of words. ABSTRACTIn Harris, Barrett, Jones & Brookes (1988), we reported the results of a detailed analysis of the initial uses of the first 10 words which were produced by four children. The present paper reports the results of an analysis of the subsequent uses of these 40 words. This analysis reveals that seven qualitatively different patterns of change occurred between the children's initial and subsequent uses of these words; the particular patterns of change which occurred support Barrett's (1986) model of early lexical development. In addition, it was found that, although there was a strong relationship between maternal speech and the children's initial word uses, the relationship between maternal speech and the children's subsequent word uses was very much weaker. These findings indicate that the role of linguistic input in early lexical development may decline quite sharply once the child has established initial uses for words.

This study investigates the relationship between the emergence of understanding of object names and the development of pointing during the first year of life. Detailed records of the developing lexical comprehension of six children were obtained from the age of six months together with information about the use of pointing gestures. A comparison of the development of comprehension and the use of pointing revealed the existence of a very specific relationship: there was a highly significant positive correlation between the first appearance of pointing and the first understanding of object names. There was no relationship between the development of pointing and more general measures of comprehension development. The significance of these findings for accounts of the development of referential understanding is discussed.

Both spontaneous and elicited looks are likely to involve attention to the mother's face. However, while active elicitation of attention is an important part of successful communication with young deaf children, this does not appear necessary for typically developing hearing children who turn to look at their mother's face on hearing her voice. The implications of these findings for differences in the dynamics of communication with young deaf and hearing children are discussed.