Based on a portion of author's Ph.D. dissertation, Communicative Development and Children's Answers to Questions," University of Wisconsin, 1970. (Author/RD)

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)

The conditions whereby a concept might be learned on the basis of a language mediation process prior to the inductive learning of subordinate concepts are sketched. The view is expressed that grammar treatments which are apt to primary education should be defined on the basis of a pedagogy's needs for linguistic characterizations of concepts to be…

This paper proposes a theory on how language functions for the child and in what sequence these functions develop. The notion of communicative intention is contrasted with grammatical categories and with the goal of an utterance. Finally, communicative intentions and goals of utterances are contrasted with the innumerable pragmatic purposes which…

A detailed error analysis was performed on spontaneous and elicited speech samples of Anglo second graders learning Spanish. The results tended to disconfirm the L to the subpower of 1 = L to the subpower of 2 hypothesis that first and second language acquisition follow identical patterns. However, evidence suggests that genuine similarities do…

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…

A study was undertaken to determine how much knowledge children have of grammatical systems before they evidence the systems in their spontaneous speech in a productive way. A child aged about two and a half years was examined over several months through elicited imitation causing him to repeat a model sentence immediately after the researcher.…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the linguistic differences in the spontaneous speech of language-deviant children in two very different situations. Spontaneous speech samples of eleven five-year-old language-deviant children were obtained from: (1) the traditional adult-child therapy situation using appropriate stimulus materials; and…

If the question of what it is that is innate is simply left as some kind of human learning potential, this position, representative of the nativist philosophy, does not differ radically from that of behaviorists. The latter position holds that a human being starts out with a mind which is basically empty and receptive to, subject to, and the…

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).…

Comprehension of reversible active and passive sentences was studied with 48 Japanese children between the ages of two and six. Four types of sentences were constructed using passive and active structures and two word orders: subject-object-verb (SOV) and object-subject-verb (OSV). The basic order of elements in a simple sentence in Japanese is…

This study hypothesized that recent experience with a set of words is a strong influence on selecting words in an appropriate context where other lexical items are equally available for selection, i.e., recency training should significantly increase the probability of occurrence of words chosen to fill gaps in structured sentences. Two experiments…

The general goals of this study of Luo children in Kenya were (1) to provide a description of the acquisition of language in terms of categories acquired within the age range of 12-35 months; (2) to account for their linguistic competence in the generation of their language; and (3) to illustrate how social settings alter the linguistic…

Since speech pathologists are interested in the role nonfluent behavior may play in the onset or development of stuttering, this study compared the linguistic behavior of 17 fluent four-year-old children to that of 17 nonfluent children similar in age, intelligence, sex, sibling status, race, socioeconomic status, and education. The aspects of…

This article provides a discussion of current topics in psycholinguistics and of the current research on these problems. The author discusses current thought on the biological foundations of language and the problem of universals. If human language is a species-particular achievement contingent upon a biological endowment, there should be certain…