A comprehension task employing English animate third person pronouns was run on 100 children from three to seven years of age. Results show that comphrehension of forms beyond chance level first appears at age five, with continuing improvement through ages six and seven. Mastery of gender distinction preceded number and case. (Author/PJM)

Spontaneous and imitated-sentence responses of six children were examined for their sound patterns in the acquisition of /x/, /f/, and /s/. The data tend to support the position that children may produce forms exemplifying geographical-dialectical constraints, general developmental processes, and variability in development across children.…

A group of three-year-old children was compared to one of four-year-old children in the usage of 26 syntactic transformations on the basis of 60 utterances per child. The older group used significantly more sentence transformations per child and significantly fewer simple active declarative sentences than the younger. Among the older group 10 out…