The purpose of this study was to analyze differences in children's written questions by means of the theoretical model of transformational-Generative grammar. Eight questions written by children in grades 4, 5, 6, 7, and 9 comprised the nucleus of this study. The eight questions were chosen from a larger group of questions and separated into…

Results of tests comparing the ability of children and adults to understand and produce sentences according to type (active, question, passive, negative) and complexity (simple, center-embedding, double-embedding). (Author/FWB)

Special issue devoted to research and the teaching of French in the elementary school. (VM)

In a previous paper, J. Hurford accounts for errors in children's question forms by postulating that children incorrectly internalize adult rules. This article suggests that this rule is inconsistent and unjestified, and that such errors are due to segmentation problems and processing limitations. (CHK)

This article criticizes a previous paper that stressed a transformational analysis of children's question acquisition. It is argued that a surface structure generalization analysis makes empirically correct predictions about mistakes both in acquisition of inverted word order and in the form of "wh" questions. (CHK)

The discussion throughout this paper is devoted to answering the question: What is the nature of our knowledge of language and what theoretical assumptions does the answer entail for linguistic description? Discussed are--(1) what it means to know a language, (2) the distinction between linguistic competence and performance, (3) justification of…

This paper reports on a study conducted to determine the abilities of children to make optional transformations in sentences conjoined with "and." The subjects were 35 middle-class children between the ages of five and eight, who demonstrated average school achievement, spoke standard American English, and had normal speech and hearing. A…

This investigation was intended to study the effects of some linguistic variables on child and adult memories for sentences when recall was prompted by nouns embedded in the sentences. Its purpose was to examine for developmental differences in sentence processing systems expected by psycholinguistic theory and research. A group of 64 subjects,…

Data on the complexity of relative clause formation in children indicate that right embedding precedes central embedding in development. Previous research on the subject argues that configurations where coreferential NP's function as subjects are less complex than configurations where coreferential NP's function as objects. It appears that the…

This study begins with a discussion of what a phonological rule is, and how the term has been used in previous investigations. The relation between the child's phonological system and the adult's system, the relationship between discrimination and production, and the viability of positing underlying forms for children's words are also discussed.…

The author aims: (1) to show that generative phonology uses essentially the method of internal reconstruction which has previously been employed only in diachronic studies in setting up synchronic underlying phonological representations; (2) to show why synchronic analysis should add the comparative method to its arsenal, together with whatever…

The distinction between deep and surface levels of language; the intersection of learning theory and cognitive development; and the linguistic competence of the pre-literate child and the illiterate adult are highlighted. Author argues that T-G Grammar will be a powerful aid to recognizing and dealing with problems of mass literacy education.…

Goodluck and Solan (EJ 205 641) presented alternative formulations about why errors predicted by basic operations fail to occur and suggested a refined hypothesis. Each aspect of their argument is addressed, and it is concluded that descriptive power, methodology and principles for restricting error predictions favor our original analysis. (RD)

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…

Contrasts the syntactic view of forward and backward deletion of base structure elements with the idea that pragmatic factors of situational redundancy and perceptual grouping account for conjunction reduction in children. (EKN)