This article discusses a study designed to ascertain the comprehension of the role of "because" in a sentence in children between the ages of 5;8 and 10;11. (CFM)

This article discusses a study designed to determine the order of acquisition of the two expressions "in front of" and "behind," using two featureless objects. (CFM)

Early childhood learning of language has led some to postulate innate knowledge of an abstract symbolic linguistic system. However, if the child's abstract understanding initially requires concrete support in the form of agreement of the message with his nonlinguistic experience, the indication would be that the development of syntactic…

Swedes in four different age groups (9, 12, 15 and 18 years) judged written words which varied in three dimensions: syntactic category, objective frequency, and polysemy (multiple meaning). The subjects judged ease of comprehension of 24 words in a factorial arrangement. The method used was Thurstone's paired comparisons. A predicted complex…

This study was conducted to examine the acquisition of the meaning of the temporal conjunctions "before" and "after." The initial hypothesis was that in the acquisition of a word, the child learns its semantic components one at a time. The subjects were 40 school children attending the Bing Nursery School at Stanford…

This study investigated preschool children's understanding of the words "know" and "guess." Subjects for the study were 48 male and female preschool children ranging in age from 3.6 to 6.6 years. The children were divided into three age groups representing one year intervals. The task for the study involved a "guessing" game in which a colored…

Evidence is provided to refute the suggestion, made by Macnamara et al. (1976), that four-year-old children perform logical operations corresponding to formal logic upon the sentential components of implicative verbs to produce indirect implications. It is argued that children use past knowledge plus additional premises to derive indirect…

A study was conducted to test whether three, four, and five-year-old children would be better able to use either static or dynamic properties for grouping objects, and whether performance under these conditions would be better than when no property was given. One of the two study tasks, the free sort, also used by Rosch et al. (1976), asked…

A study was conducted to test the validity of the Linguistic Features Hypothesis, which predicts that unmarked personal pronouns will be learned first by children, yielding the following order of acquisition: first person before second, followed by third; singular before plural; and subjective case before objective or genitive. A review of the…

Comprehension of the quantifiers "some" and "all" was studied with 202 children, three to nine years old. Thirty-two quantifier sentences dealing with descriptions of circles and squares were presented to the children. Wooden objects were presented to some children to see if results were affected by the choice of abstract objects, but no…

The recent experimental literature on the acquisition of English antonyms is reviewed, with special reference to the position of Eve Clark and the particular ontogenetic assumptions her position entails. The assumptions examined are: (1) in a hierarchically organized lexical domain, the order of acquisition appears to be from the top of the…

Children's early utterances were studied to determine whether there are developmental changes in the content, context, frequency, and form of their speech and the degree to which the changes correspond to changes in Piagetian cognitive stage. Twenty children were studied; six were 10 or 11 months old, and the remaining 14 were distributed evenly…

The development of production and comprehension by one two-year-old girl of three Japanese constructions (passives, causatives, and "te moraw"), which have similar surface configurations "NP ga NP ni V ("rare"/ "sase"/ "te moraw") TENSE," is investigated through elicited imitations and responses to the investigator's questions about the content of…

The acquisition of rules for formulating causative verbs was studied with children over a period of a few years. Most of the data is based on the spontaneous speech of the author's two daughters, from age 2;6 to 6;2 and from age 2;4 to 3;11. It was hypothesized that there are at least two prerequisites for the child's formulation of a general rule…

A study was conducted to compare the relative performance on yes-no questions of bilingual and monolingual children and to discuss the relationship of semantic development and linguistic development, both in the bilinguals and monolinguals. Eighteen English monolingual, eighteen Japanese monolingual, and eighteen Japanese-English bilingual…