The two primary purposes of this book are to extend information about children's language learning and to look at existing notions of how children acquire language by considering what is meant by linguistic competence. The introductory chapter presents an account of two approaches to the study of language acquisition and outlines the author's…

This book describes how the child acquires a linguistic system before he is capable of verbal utterances or has developed the ability to structure language in a meaningful way. The first chapter of the book contains a discussion of previous language development studies on learning the mother tongue and proposes a hypothesis of language development…

The linguistic abilities demonstrated by second grade students show a high level of competence in the use of syntactic structures and lexicon. This report describes and interprets, in terms of language function, the talking and writing of fifteen Australian children. Transcripts of conversations provide the basis for the linguistic analysis and…