To learn how children acquire "metalinguistic competence," the development of the concept of "the word" was experimentally studied in four- to ten-year-olds. (Author/SDH)

An analysis of sentence grammar is made to show that the ability to produce coherent texts emerges slowly and late in linguistic and cognitive development. (HP)

Expands on study by Brown and Hanlon which showed that parents seemed more attuned to semantic value of their child's speech rather than grammatical form. However, this more recent study suggests that language learning environment presents subtle cues, distinguishing between well-formed and ill-formed sentences, evidenced by mothers' inclinations…

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…

Since behaviorist conceptions fail to account adequately for the individual's unique reorganization of knowledge and his generation of original sentences, this study was intended to produce a conceptual structure to describe the systematic processes of high-order language events as a basis of a theory of language and teaching practice. It…