This paper reviews research on the early receptive language development of normal and language-handicapped children. A functional analysis perspective emphasizes how developmental changes are effected through the interactions of children with their environments. Lexical acquisition and early morphological/syntactic acquisition are addressed, functional processes that appear to be responsible for early lexical learning and for the application of syntactic rules during interpretation of early multiword utterances during normal receptive language development are isolated. Lexical training with language-handicapped children might be improved by (a) encouraging and making sure of children's action response strategy, (b) exploiting children's early reliance on extra-linguistic cues and then systematically shifting stimulus control, and (c) taking advantage of an elimination strategy. Morphological/syntactic training might be improved by selecting language input and training strategies that have been found to facilitate recombinative generalization.
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