Piaget has suggested that a child's language reflects the degree to which he is able to take into account the point of view of his listener. His inability to do so results in what Piaget calls egocentric speech whereas what Piaget calls socialized speech indicates that the child actually adopts his listener's viewpoint and engages in an exchange…

Criticism of much of the previous research into the syntax of children's language. (RD)

This paper represents an effort to explain the language development of the child within the analytic frame of overtly observable data and without recourse either to mathematical models or to postulating hypothetical underlying forms. From longitudinal studies of two-year old children conducted by the author as well as from similar data reported in…

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)

Traditionally linguists have considered pidgin languages as corrupted constructions of European vocabulary based on African or Asian syntax. Recent systematic studies of these languages show complex patterns of mutual influence on many levels. To explain the structural similarities of pidgin languages, some linguists, such as Keith Whinnom, have…

The ability of young children to communicate at the time they produce their first words was studied, with particular reference to the question of whether children are able to modify their requests depending on the adult's response. The subjects were four children ranging in age from 15 to 18 months; the data were their requests of adults coded…

Irregularities in oral fluency, or "disfluencies," are common in the speech habits of both children and adults. Disfluencies can take the form of hesitations, revisions, repetitions, or interjections. Most disfluenceies do not occur at random, but are directly linked to other factors such as verbal planning--the combination of decisions…

The crib talk reported here of a 2;2-2;4-year-old boy replicates the phenomenon of crib talk reported in previous studies by other investigators. This study adds a corpus of mother-child interaction (MCI) and tests one aspect of the hypothesis that crib talk may enhance production of linguistic forms at a later date. Transcripts of monologues were…

Sixteen middle class, four-person families were used in a study comparing communicative behavior of parents interacting with a younger child (3 or 4 years old) whose language skills were developing, and with an older child (6 or 7 years old) whose basic language skills were established. Combinations of sex of siblings and sibling position were…

Transcriptions of recorded conversations of nine-year-old French children are analyzed and presented in this comparative word count. The actual count of the 55,588 word corpus is arranged alphabetically and contrasted with selected, identical words found in the Francais Fondamental word list. Proper nouns are listed separately at the end of the…

A study of overregularized use of verbs by two children over a period when they were 2 1/2 to 5 years of age shows overregularizations in two directions: non-causative verbs were used as causatives; and causative verbs were used non-causatively. According to terminology from logic, predicates were classified according to the number of noun-phrase…

These transcriptions of conversation illustrate linguistic behavior and interests of the average ten-year-old French child. Patterned after a previously transcribed series of conversations of nine-year olds, the 14 dialogues in this collection serve as a linguistic corpus suitable for educational research and textbook development. A graphic code…

This bibliography, which emphasizes material published between 1957 and 1972, is centered on studies about the normal child's acquisition and development of his first language. Material dealing with handicaps, deviant language development, and second language learning is not included unless it is significantly related to studies of the normal…

Investigators agree that mothers employ a variety of request forms and that children seem to be able to respond to these forms with a remarkable degree of accuracy. It is suggested that the speech of mothers to their children is filled with requests which are really not requests at all. It is shown that many of what appear to be adult requests to…