This dissertation draws on both qualitative and quantitative approaches to investigate the linguistic practices of teachers and children who are learning Mandarin Chinese as a Heritage Language (CHL) in two dual immersion preschools in California. CHL children have been interpreted as novice members in local speech communities who actively explore…

The linguistic state-of-the-art relevant to the construction of a battery of tests intended to yield language proficiency profiles of preschool children is surveyed in this paper. A basic assumption is that language data can be structured with a model that reflects stages in the development of control over phonological features, morphological…

Vowel production of a 14-month-old girl was studied over a 6-month period. Sixty percent of the vowels were produced correctly. A complex pattern of vowel preferences and errors was partially related to prespeech babbling preferences and strongly related to word structure variables (monosyllabic versus disyllabic). (Author/JDD)

Five experiments were performed in which nursery school children were taught to identify persons, animals, or objects in pictures that took the nominative, objective, or locative case in sentences about the pictures. Inferences are made about categories in children's thinking including animate, and actor and agent. (CTM)

The pragmatic and semantic categories used by Ss varied across age groups. Results are discussed with regard to age, expressive modality, mean length of utterances, and hearing loss. There was much variation among these parameters in communicative development across Ss. (Author/DLS)

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of varying the semantic content of active and passive sentences along a dimension of "personalness" on the comprehension of those sentences by preschool age children. The study focuses on a current linguistic controversy dealing with the relative adequacy of syntax-based and…

The intent of this study was to examine the development of three aspects of preschoolers' private speech: coefficients of egocentricism, the extent to which speech regulates actions, and the syntactic and semantic structures of individual utterances. Forty-one randomly chosen preschoolers (26 females, 15 males) were placed in three age groups (3,…

Two experiments indicating that children's linguistic generalizational biases change from a semantically-based system to a syntactical-structural system provide evidence for a semantic-relational bias in children's early grammars and support the notion that children's generalizational biases shift from a semantic-relational basis to a…

Examined the pattern of deletion of final "/t/" and "/d/" in word final consonant clusters in 3- and 4-year-old children (n=16) and their degree of mastery of phonological and grammatical constraints. Results indicate that children as young as three had mastered the phonological constraints on (-t, d) deletion and that the…

This study investigated variables that might be associated with outcome differences in language development of 10 children (ages 10-20 months) with blindness or severe visual impairments, attending a developmental vision clinic in southern England. Subjects' early patterns of expressive language development were examined and related to observed…

The intent of this study was to determine the extent to which preschool children's speech to self, their private speech, was differentiated from their social speech. Ten randomly chosen preschool children, six boys and four girls with a median age of 56 months, were observed in conditions supportive of oral communication (free play), and in…

The significance of three mothers' speech for their infants' language development is considered in a continuing longitudinal study. The study began when the children (two females and one male) were 5 and 6 months of age and will continue until the subjects are 3 years old. In the speech data reported the children were from 6 to 18 months of age.…

Drawing upon recent research findings and upon a case study of a child learning to talk and to read, the author outlines the important similarities in the development of both language and literacy. The characteristics of parent-child interaction which support language acquisition--semantic contingency, scaffolding, accountability procedures, and…

The term "scaffolding" refers to adult behaviors that support and guide children's participation in activities, including speech events, enabling the children to extend the range of what they are able to do without assistance. A study examined how scaffolding behavior in support of expository discourse differed among preschool teachers in…

Five articles explore ideas about the nature and kinds of courses dealing with language and education that should be developed in teacher education programs in the Australian school curriculum, specifically where English as mother tongue is used. They include: "Some Recent Developments in Mother Tongue English Teaching in Australia"…