ABSTRACT
Children's earliest speech repertoire is limited, transitional, and imperfectly language like on a number of counts. A study of the characteristics of the speech uses of 16 Hebrew-speaking children, 10 to 12 months old demonstrated system independence. The variety of the coding systems employed reflects, furthermore, basic theoretical disagreements about which early speech uses should be considered bona fide communicative act. On the contrary, the very defining characteristic of early speech uses is that they fulfill only partially the criteria for prototypical meaningful communicative acts. Other formally constant deictic utterances often occurring in early singleword speech are here, there, and that, which typically constitute fixed forms expressing some communicative intent. In a study of children's mastery of mapping principles at the single-word stage, Anat Ninio found that the transition from unmarked, key-word mapping to marked or selective mapping occurred around the middle of the second year.
