ABSTRACT
The past 2 decades have provided us with a wealth of information about the verbal input that children receive and about the verbal output that they produce. These studies have led to a better understanding of the characteristics of these dimensions but only have provided a limited insight into the nature of the transition from nonverbal communication to speech. By its very nature data concerned exclusively with speech is unlikely to reveal the way in which children normally begin to produce and comprehend single words. The utilization of some form of nonverbal information would appear necessary to enable infants to make the connection between words and objects or events. Of the various relationships between speech and nonverbal information which can be examined, the relationship that exists between referential words and nonverbal information is perhaps one of the more interesting. This is primarily because the child's early vocabulary is largely composed of these words, and that the speech of adults to children contains a high proportion of referential words (Benedict, 1979; Nelson, 1973; Phillips, 1973). There is also a particular fascination with this relationship because it involves the issue of understanding the meaning of words, a topic long debated by philosophers.
