1. Introduction (by Pieraut-Le Bonniec, Gilberte); 2. Speech Bases; 3. Phylogeny and Ontogeny of Languages (by Bresson, F.); 4. Prenatal Familiarization (by Lecanuet, J.P.); 5. Initial Equipment for Speech Perception (by Bertoncini, Josiane); 6. Target-Language Influences on Prespeech (by Boysson-Bardies, B. de); 7. Prosodic Cues in Very Young Children&wp0,39;s Speech (by Bacri, N.); 8. Basic Discourse Capacities; 9. Cohesion: Syntactic Organization Leading to Discourse; 10. Verbs as Sentence Organizers (by Pieraut-Le Bonniec, Gilberte); 11. Pronoun Assignment in the Processing of Locally Ambiguous Sentences (by Seguy, J.); 12. Conjunctions: Developmental Issues (by Kail, Michele); 13. Children's Production of Textual Organizers (by Bronckart, J-P.); 14. The Development of Discourse Cohesion: Some Functional and Cross-Linguistic Issues (by Hickmann, Maya); 15. Coherence: Language as it Underlies and Organizes Knowledge; 16. An Opaque Text as a Mobilizer of Knowledge (by Dolitsky, Marlene); 17. The Development and Role of Narrative Schema Storytelling (by Esperet, E.); 18. Stories A Psycholinguistic and Ontogenetic Approach to the Acquisition of Narrative Abilities (by Fayol, Michel); 19. The Development of Argumentative Discourse (by Pieraut-Le Bonniec, Gilberte); 20. References; 21. Index