Reaction to another article in this issue, "How Not To Analyze the Syntax of Children" by Roger McCaig, pp. 612-18. (SW)

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)

Analysis of the communicative skills of a nine-year-old deaf boy with minimal schooling showed pantomiming and gestures to be his major mode of communication. Certain semantic patterns prevailed. Use of left or right hand also had semantic correlates. Formal and idiosynacratic signs were discovered in the boy's vocabulary. (Author/PJM)

The article examines normal language and communication development to provide insights into what parents of hearing impaired children can expect from and do for their children. Findings of particular importance for facilitating linguistic growth in hearing impaired children are discussed. (DLS)

Analyzes in detail the expressions used by 39 grade school children explaining--in writing--the rules of a ball game. The analysis focuses on the linguistic strategies employed to define the actors and the actions of the game and establishes correlations between these strategies and the sociocultural background of the writers. (MES)

Gives a syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and discourse structure analysis of mothers' speech to children of 1;0, 1;8, 2;3, and 5;0 years, showing that the age of the child to whom mothers were speaking could be predicted very accurately from her speech. The changes in mothers' speech are responses to concurrent changes in children's language…

This study is an attempt to investigate the efficacy of using existing semantic relations categories for understanding how children comprehend the verb "with" + noun construction. (Author)

Reports on research into the early semantic-syntactic utterances of deaf children as compared to those of learning children. It is suggested that differences in acquisition patterns may be attributable to the pedagogical nature of deaf language acquisition. (Author/AM)

This study demonstrates the influence of a visit to the United States on the communicative competence in English of a bilingual child who lives in Rome, Italy, with his American mother and Italian father. (CFM)

Suggests that the concept of an interactive environment has significant ramifications for re-assessing and/or formulating a contemporary, comprehensive theory of language acquisition. (MH)

Extends the study of children's knowledge of Binding Condition B to a construction containing pronouns embedded in conjoined noun phrases. The study included pronouns bound by a quantifier. Results support the argument that anaphoric relations are constrained by more than one module of grammar. (12 references) (Author/CK)

Presents a new syntactical analysis of the negative marker "no" in child English. Claims that the majority of "no" constructions in early child English are determiner phrases in which "no" appears as a determiner. The claim is supported on the basis of distributional and morphosyntactic tests, a discourse analysis of children's elliptical…

Reviews "The Transition from Infancy to Language: Acquiring the Power of Expression" (L. Bloom). Underscores that Bloom's account of word learning represents an ethnographic, theoretic, and research approach that explores development by starting with the child, and looks at the many behaviors of the child and views these in relation to…

The validity of mean length of utterance (MLU) and a measure of syntactic complexity were tested against the language assessment, remediation, and screening procedure on spontaneous speech samples from 87 children, concluding that MLU is a valid measure of clausal complexity up to 4:5 and that the measure of syntactic complexity is more valid at…

Provides a contemporary Government-and-Binding reinterpretation and evaluation of Klima and Bellugi's 1966 work on the acquisition of interrogatives. It is argued that wh-questions in Child English involve a wh-pronoun positioned in the head complementizer position within the Complementizer Phrase (CP) and that children learn that wh-questions…