Child gender has been proved to affect toddlers'/children's language development in several studies, but its effect was not found to be stable across different ages or various aspects of language ability. The effect of gender on toddler's, children's and adolescents' language ability was examined in the present meta-analysis of ten Slovenian…

Purpose: In this response to Kamhi (2014), a sentence-focused framework is presented to help clinicians select treatment targets as part of a comprehensive approach to early grammatical intervention. Method: The literature on the relationship between lexical verbs, sentence structure, and tense/agreement morphemes is reviewed, and developmental…

Thirteen papers in this book illustrate MacWhinney and Bates's Competition Model (CM), with a focus on cross-linguistic processing. Studies in this volume show that (1) the CM is useful in predicting certain gross cross-linguistic differences of comprehension, particularly in relation to actor assignment and (2) children's processing strategies…

Clark's Semantic Feature Acquisition theory of semantic development is reviewed and evaluated against the recent experimental literature with special reference to the acquisition of English antonyms. (Author/MP)

A review of the literature reveals that increased syntactic maturity is developmental growth properly associated with elementary and junior high school students and that measuring this maturity will not prove that an individual writer is skilled or unskilled. Improved style, unlike increased syntactic maturity, is not quantifiable growth, though…

The article examines the child's ability to produce complex sentences with sections on a structural framework for complex language (clausal and nonclausal complexity), a developmental perspective (coordination of clauses, subordination of nominal, adverbial, and relative clauses), and applied considerations (evaluating and teaching complex…

Discusses the language development in individuals with Down's syndrome in both early childhood and adulthood, and outlines intervention programs to assist language development in these individuals not only in their early years but throughout their lives. (71 references) (CFM)

Studies on the acquisition of relative clauses are reviewed. Two polarities among a variety of possible approaches are: Slobin's (1971) study that emphasizes acquisition process and learning strategies, and studies like Sheldon's (1974) that emphasize the linguistic structures involved. Early proposals that children experience more difficulty in…

This study presents a view of diachronic change in language which focuses on the conflicting interaction of principles determining language organization. Principles of structural and perceptual nature are in conflict in language of the Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) type, because of the relative clause construction. Theoretical and empirical evidence…

Presents evidence revealing the complexity of young children's language understandings with regard to spelling patterns, parts of speech, and vocabulary; points out that teachers must build upon the language knowledge that children bring to school. (GT)