A study is reported which examined the acquisition of deictic verbs by asking children to identify the speaker or the addressee of utterances containing "come,""go,""bring," and "take." Analysis showed that children go through several stages in the acquisition of deictic verbs. (Author/RM)

Research is reported in which children were tested for their comprehension of four types of sentences with relative clauses. The Parallel Function Hypothesis is proposed, and implications for adult grammar are discussed. (Author/RM)

Investigates extent to which certain co-referential and structural constraints are reflected in the anaphoric noun phrases of written narratives of elementary school writers. Results indicate that poor writers are relatively insensitive to the constraints of the more difficult co-referential context, but that they (poor writers) are as sensitive…

Based in part on an Indiana University doctoral dissertation; segments presented to the Midwestern Psychological Association, Cincinnati, Ohio, 1970. Research supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Traineeship, a Public Health Service Predoctoral Research Fellowship to the author, and a Public Health Service Research Grant to Richard…

A study is described which examined the retrieval of regular and irregular past tense verbs. Results suggested that preterites such as "taught" are not stored as separate and independent lexical units but are formed from the verb stem by means of derivational rules. (Author/RM)

Preliminary version of this article presented at the meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development, Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 1971. Research and preparation of the paper supported in part by an Intramural Grant from the Regents of the University of California to T. Kenney. (VM)

Research supported in part by a National Science Foundation Grant. (VM)

Spontaneous speech samples of 15 children were analyzed for appropriate and inappropriate use and nonuse of the past tense verbal inflection. It was found that: (1) two types of overgeneralization errors have acquisitional relevance; and (2) partial regularity blocks overgeneralization errors. Two hypotheses were not supported. (CHK)

Five experiments are carried out to determine the comprehension of passives by children. Results obtained demonstrate that comprehension rests on knowledge of syntactic structure. V - NP were interpreted as verb-object. Passives lacking a preposition were interpreted as actives. Competence in passives may be at a high level before performance is…

Descriptive grammars based on sets of rewrite rules were constructed to summarize the structure and organization of 120 entries in a second grade student's journal of class news. These rules illuminated the relationship between experience, abstraction, and generation of structure, and the use of structure to express complex thoughts. (PMJ)