Children with cleft lip and/or palate show early delays in speech and vocabulary development that may have an impact on later communication and social development. While delays in the complexity of babbling may put children at risk for later delays in speech and language development, there is considerable variability in development. This study focused on the rate of children's communication acts, canonical vocalizations, and word use as they made the transition from the pre-linguistic to linguistic development. The study included 15 children with non-syndromic cleft lip and/or palatewho were seen at three time points between 17–34 months age. Communication rates were calculated from parent–child language samples collected during play activities. Assignment to linguistic stages was based on the children's expressive vocabulary, as reported on the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Sentences. From the pre-linguistic to linguistic level, the children's average rate per minute of: communicative acts overall increased significantly from 1.49 to 3.07 per minute; canonical vocalizations from 0.21 to 0.90 per minute; and word usefrom 0.16 to 3.61 per minute. Rates of communicative acts were associated with later word use. It appears that children with clefts rely on non-verbal communicative acts when verbal development is delayed.

MA, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, 2012 / This research-report presents a theoretical exploration of musical encoding which has its basis in general semiotic theory. By examining what this reveals about the problematic and mysterious issue of music’s meaning, I argue that the most visceral and direct form of it is found in the manner in which the composer shapes a certain kind of temporal experience (erlebnis) which is engendered by the music itself. This reveals that sensations of goal-directed movement, closure, tension and release are shaped in a phenomenological way against a background of continuity that is established by metrical cyclicity and phrasal periodisation. As a result, the interpretation of certain kinds of accumulative structural effects generated by the gestural (rhythmic and melodic/harmonic) inflections of the temporal and intonational planes become meaningful in a rhetorical, affective (affekten) and topical sense. A study of Ngqoko (Xhosa) overtone-music, as a case study into African indigenous music (as opposed to the examples cited of Western art music), shows that an intensification of the relationships between pitch and rhythm that exist in speech-tone results in the formation of melody and a culturally embedded vocabulary of intonations. I argue that this resultant edifice exists in the music of most cultures and that this ultimately serves as the basis of musical encoding. Therefore musical meaning develops in ways that are completely intrinsic to music.

Peut-on considérer qu'un groupe de jeunes enfants entre 5 et 11 mois interagissant entre eux, peut constituer un contexte d'acquisition particulier avec des bénéfices spécifiques sur un accès au langage et à la communication ? D'abord nous devons déterminer s'il existe une dynamique entre très jeunes pairs d'âge et ensuite examiner quelle serait sa qualité. Prenant comme cadre de référence les interactions entre mère et enfant déjà caractérisées dans la littérature scientifique, l'observation et l'analyse d'un corpus transversal et longitudinal recueilli en milieu de crèche francophone à Paris en 2006 montrent comment certains enfants interagissent entre eux. Afin d'organiser les données, cette dynamique a été classifiée en trois procédés proto-communicatifs : l'attention conjointe, les interactions et les proto-actes du langage, qui ont été chacun, articulés par types. L'analyse qualitative de ces données met en évidence des caractéristiques équivalentes et plus performantes que celles des procédés proto-communicatifs décrits entre mère et enfant. L'observation de l'interaction entre très jeunes pairs d'âge peut constituer un nouveau support de données utiles pour comprendre l'accès au langage et à la communication chez l'enfant. / Can a group of very young infants, between 5 and 11 months of age, interacting together provide an acquisition context with specific benefits of access to language and communication ? First we must determine if a communicative dynamic between very young peers exists and then examine its relevant qualities. Taking as a framework the already theorized interactions between mother and infant, the analysis of transversal and longitudinal data collected from a French nursery in Paris in 2006 shows some babies interacting with each other. In order to organize the data, this dynamic has been classified into three proto-communicative processes; joint attention, interactions and proto-speech acts. Qualitative analysis of peers interactions data shows equivalent and more advanced capacities than those of proto-communicative processes described between mother and infants. These results demonstrate that interactions between very young aged peers may provide a new panel data to understand the access to language and communication in children.