The aim of the study presented here was to examine variations in the forms and functions of agreement and refusal messages – which can be solely gestural, solely verbal, or combined gestural and verbal – by thirty children aged 1;4, 2;0, and 3;0 (ten in each age group) observed at home during an interaction with their mother. The results showed that even though verbal forms were the predominant ones as a whole, gestural forms were carried over into the linguistic period, and for the youngest children, constituted the sole means of agreeing and refusing. They also showed that the most frequently expressed function was assertion.

Two experiments examined the relation between early object name learning and the ability to represent objects by their abstract shapes. In Experiment 1, two-year-old children with productive vocabularies in the bottom 20th percentile – ‘late talkers' – were compared with (1) same-age children with larger vocabularies, and (2) younger children matched for productive vocabulary, on their ability to recognize named common objects. Object categories were represented two ways: by lifelike, perceptually rich toys, and by grey caricatures of those objects' abstract shapes. All 3 groups recognized lifelike objects equally well. Both typically-developing control groups were better than late talkers at recognizing shape caricatures of objects whose names they knew. In Experiment 2, late talkers and age-matched controls identified named objects represented by lifelike toys and by duplicates of those toys covered in grey textured paint. Age-matched controls knew more of the object names overall, but both they and the late talkers performed equally well on both kinds of test objects. Thus, late talkers had some difficulty in Experiment 1 recognizing objects from abstract shape cues, but no difficulty in Experiment 2 when the shape cues were realistic. The findings imply a relation between the growth of productive vocabulary and the emergence of the ability to represent object categories by abstract shape.