Book Reviews
Abstract
<p>This is the second report of a massive study of child language that has come to be known as "the Bristol study." It was carried out on local children by members of the University of Bristol. It is the best longitudinal study of its type that I have seen.</p><p>The children were 128 Bristol children selected to be a representative sample of linguistically and mentally normal children in the area. Some of the children were 15 and some 39 months old at the beginning of the study. The children's spontaneous speech was recorded for a whole day once every 3 months for a total of 10 recordings per child. During each day recorded, 24 samples of 90 seconds each were taken between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m.</p><p>Perhaps the most ingenious feature of the study was a portable radio strapped to the child that was turned on by a voice key. This device permitted as unobtrusive a set of observations as seems possible. One feels, then, that one really is in touch with the spontaneous speech of children and their caretakers.</p><p>The utterances collected were twice as numerous as the researchers anticipated. The enormous corpus proved difficult to feed to a