Variability in Early Communicative Development

Drawing on parent's reports of more than 1800 children, this monograph describes both typical and exceptional courses of communicative development in children between the ages of eight and 30 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 should be of interest to developmental psychologists, as well as linguists interested in language acquisition.