Variability in Early Communicative Development (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development)

Drawing on parent's reports of more than 1,800 children, this Monograph describes in detail both typical and exceptional courses of communicative development between the ages of eight and thirty months. The authors' large dataset offers unusually specific information on the developmentally variable course of individual lexical, gestural, and grammatical skills. The wide variability found among children's acquisition of these skills presents a challenge to the concept of the "model child," and will intrigue developmental psychologists as well as linguists interested in language acquisition.