An experiment was undertaken with young children to look at the relative contribution of discourse constraints, subject anaphors, and the semantics of verbs to the integration of an utterance into its discourse representation. Children aged 5, 7, and 10 years heard a series of short stories, each consisting of three sentences and an incomplete…

An investigation of how Mandarin-speaking children aged three to eight interpret sentences involving the universal quantifier "mei" ("every") and the quantificational adverbs "dou" ("all") and "quan" ("all") focused on how and when the child acquires adult interpretations of the…

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)

A study of Korean children's interpretation of the reflexive pronoun "caki" when it precedes a third person noun phrase, that is, in backward anaphora, had as subjects 4- to 11-year-old children living in Korea. Test sentences designed on the basis of two important syntactic aspects in Korean reflexive anaphora--relational hierarchy and…

A study investigated Japanese 3-to-5-year-olds' comprehension of sentences using the temporal terms "before" and "after" and examined whether contextual information helped the children respond correctly. The children were asked to perform a task with a toy either before or after performing another task with a different toy.…

To assess a child's communicative ability, it is important to develop not only measures of his understanding of vocabulary, but of his understanding of the syntax of language: patterns of words, regularities, and relationships of words in a sentence. Controlled test situations should be established in which the child receives minimal cues from the…

Recent work in syntactic theory has revealed that word order is more constrained in subordinate clauses, particularly nonasserted clauses, than in main clauses (Ross, 1973; Hooper & Thompson, 1973). On the other hand, main clauses are restricted in the extent to which they allow pronominalization and verb phrase deletion (Lakoff, 1968). These…

Experimental research on the environmental conditions that promote generative language learning is reviewed. Recombinative generalization is introduced as a process that enables individuals to express and to comprehend novel utterances. This review focuses on the use of a miniature linguistic system paradigm to explore how recombinative…

The purpose of this series of four studies was to precisely describe the code and dialect features of the speech of both lower class Negro children and middle class white children. In the first study, 16 white middle class (WMC) children were compared to 16 Negro lower class (NLC) children on both an imitation and a comprehension task. The WMC…

Three empirical studies were conducted to investigate the hypothesis that the "easy to see" construction (such as in the sentence "children are hard to understand") is acquired at a younger age than the 7-9 year range reported by previous studies (Cambon and Sinclair, 1974; Chomsky, 1969; 1972; Cromer, 1970; Kessel, 1970).…

This study examined the effects of children's cognitively based role expectations on their judgments of the grammatical acceptability of sentences. Sixty children, 12 each in grades 4 through 8, individually heard 10 sentences violating the Minimum Distance Principle (MDP). The sentences were grammatical, but linguistically complex, and violated…

Investigates early literacy acquisition in Turkish with its phonologically transparent orthography and regular letter-sound correspondences. Findings reveal that such orthography fosters the early development of word recognition skills and that phonological awareness contributes to word recognition in the early stages of reading acquisition. (33…

The ability of children at different ages to distinguish instructions to "ask" from instructions to "tell" and the types of structures used to express these directives were studied. Subjects were 120 children, aged 2 years 6 months to 6 years 6 months. Children were instructed to either ask or tell an adult or another child to give them puzzle…