Parent-child conversations are a potential source of children's developing understanding of the biological domain. We investigated patterns in parent-child conversations that may inform children about biological domain boundaries. At a marine science center exhibit, we compared parent-child talk about typical sea animals with faces (fish) with…

Results of four experiments suggest that two-year-olds may be capable of forming inclusion relations when they hear a novel word for an object that already has a familiar name. (PCB)

Describes a tool for determining a student's level of language development through oral responses; indicates a positive correlation between achievement test scores and oral language production. (MAI)

In an experiment in which preschool children were asked questions such as "Which box is taller than it is fat?" the results were interpreted to mean that the linguistic strategy of attending to the first clause is more resistant to change than the preference for simply choosing the largest object. (Author/RM)

This study examines the relative contributions of rote-memorization, analogic formation and rule-operation in the production of plurals. Rule-operation was found to be important in that children producing responses characteristic of a given stage did not produce responses for later stages. Contributions of analogic formation and rote-memorization…

Infants learn their language by first determining, independent of language, the meaning which a speaker intends to convey to them, and by then working out the relationship between the meaning and the expression they heard. (Author)

Seven different age levels were used to test the correlation between age and unfilled pauses (UP) and between age and parenthetical remarks (PR) in narratives elicited by visual stimuli. (Author/AM)

This paper discusses the role of attention to uncertainty in mediating the transition from sensorimotor activity to language. It is proposed that language from the very beginning is used to resolve uncertainty by selectively marking points of change, deviation from the familiar or choice from among alternatives. Several research findings are…

Children aged 2 - 4 were tested to determine the effects of plausibility on comprehension of negative statements. It was found that negatives about an exceptional item in an array, i.e. plausible negatives, were understood before implausible negatives. Other results are described and discussed. (Author/RM)

A rating instrument for describing nine structural characteristics of written compositions is presented and explained. (JH)

Describes a study done to determine whether the degree of children's familiarity with component words was related to (1) their ability to produce productive patterns as opposed to associative and grouping patterns, and (2) their ability to use broader scope rather than lexically based patterns. (SED)

The complexity of language of four, five, and six year old children was examined in a psycholinguistic study that attempted to differentiate the characteristics of sentences that were difficult for children to comprehend from those which were easy, and to discover whether children used a subject-verb-object (S-V-O) language strategy to interpret…

Intended as an introduction to psycholinguistics from the linguist's point of view, this book addresses itself to three main topics: the innateness of language, the relationship of linguistic knowledge to language usage, and the comprehension and production of speech. In 12 chapters, the book discusses the nature of language development, the…

In the first part of the paper the idea of the cognitive network is developed. The network consists of concepts linked together by relationships which are themselves concepts. Concepts are learned according to simple rules, and the network grows as new concepts are learned. Part II considers the growth and structure of language. The growth of…