There are many studies devoted to the segmental level of a phonological development. From this perspective, the phonological development is discussed as a sequence of separate phonemes acquisition. In contrary, following the whole-word analysis [1], the main point is how a child copes with the whole-word acquisition. For the latter approach, a longitudinal corpus of spontaneous speech is the most suitable data. The aims of the current study were: a) to estimate a distribution of word-structure patterns with different phonological and articulation complexity, produced by Russian child (2;04-6;05) during his daily conversations with adults; b) to analyze dynamic changes of this distribution. All the words were analysed according the pattern of their syllable structure by means of specially designed software [2] and classified into 22 basic groups; their percentage distribution was estimated. Statistical analysis revealed the most frequent syllabic structures: CVCVC and CVCCV (9-16%) and CVCVCV (8-10%). To verify an influence of the word-structure complexity on a frequency of the given words, their pMLU index [3] was estimated. The regression statistical analysis evidence a high significant determination of the word-structure complexity on their frequency in daily conversations; however, a force of this determination decreased from the age 2;04 to 6;05.

The paper deals with a comparative analysis of the Part-of-Speech Profile between different languages and discourse genres in 6-year-old typically developing Russian- vs. Lithuanian-speaking children. Results of the study inspire a discussion on a possibility to evaluate both language competence and language performance of the same subject on the basis of his/her distribution of parts of speech in the discourse.

The paper presents the methodology of narrative elicitation of dyslexic children. The experiment was conducted in Saint Petersburg (Russia) testing 9–10 year old children. The experimental group consisted of 12 children with dyslexia, and a control group contained 12 peers without any developmental disorders. Each of the subjects performed two tasks: storytelling according to a picture sequence and retelling another picture sequence. The narrative elicitation procedure was controlled from the perspective of story complexity, task order and story mode. The descriptive statistical analysis evaluated the impact of particular types of narrative elicitation on a quality of narrative in the experimental and control groups. A statistically significant difference of the impact of task order, narrative mode, and story complexity on the narrative of dyslexic children encourages to study the methodology of narrative analysis even more comprehensively and be especially careful in selecting visual stimuli for populations with atypical language development.