In two studies we use a pointing task to explore developmentally the nature of the knowledge that underlies three- and four-year-old children's ability to assign meaning to the intransitive structure. The results suggest that early in development children are sensitive to a first-noun-as-causal-agent cue and animacy cues when interpreting…

Children as young as two use sentence structure to learn the meanings of verbs. We probed the generality of sensitivity to sentence structure by moving to a different semantic and syntactic domain, spatial prepositions. Twenty-six-month-olds used sentence structure to determine whether a new word was an object-category name ("This is a corp!") or…

Two studies investigated preschool children's comprehension of the missing subject of infinitival complement clauses. In the first study, use of a Surface Structure Minimal Distance principle of the type outlined by C. Chomsky was distinguished from use of a Semantic Role Principle. Preschoolers acted out sentences in which the use of the two…

This paper reviews some of the observations made by Vygotsky about the structure and content of inner speech and its precursor egocentric speech, also called private speech. Recent advances in certain areas of linguistics are used to clarify and develop these observations. In particular, the paper focuses on Vygotsky's ideas about the predicative…

Spontaneous full passives and related constructions from 234 children, aged 2 to 13, and elicited passives from 262 college students were analyzed. The agentive non-reversible did not appear until after age 9; and until age 11 no child produced both reversible and non-reversible passives. (Author/SW)

Presents the case for a mapping theory of developmental language impairment, which branches into a theory that specific language impairment arises from impaired phonological processing and the consequent disruption of the mapping process through which the words and sentence structure of language are established. (Author/VWL)

This article deals with an important question in the area of developmental psycholinguistics. It studies the conditions for a presyntactcic utterance to become a "canonical sentence" or "canonical utterance" at the stage of the two-word combinations. Two main points are highlighted: (1) how a prelinguistic utterance between 9-12 months of age can…

Investigation of two- to four-year-olds' (N=20) understanding of temporal terms indicated that children were more likely to understand sentences using simple tasks, materials, and commands than more complicated sentences used in previous research. (Author/CB)

This monograph is based on a doctoral thesis submitted to the faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota in August 1969. (MG)

Recent work in syntactic theory has revealed that word order is more constrained in subordinate clauses, particularly nonasserted clauses, than in main clauses (Ross, 1973; Hooper & Thompson, 1973). On the other hand, main clauses are restricted in the extent to which they allow pronominalization and verb phrase deletion (Lakoff, 1968). These…

Two experiments examined the process of acquisition of sentence structure in the passive voice among young children. The subjects were several hundred monolingual French-speaking children aged 4-11 in schools in Liege, Belgium. The two experiments used different subject groups. In the first experiment, the children were required to interpret…

The cognitive levels of 60 children from grades one, three, and five were compared with their linguistic performance on selected examples of similes and metaphors. Cognitive level was measured using Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices; a new instrument was developed to assess children's linguistic performance. Results indicated a significant…

Sentences were constructed in which the terms "before" and "after" were embedded in logically constrained and logically reversible sequences. The preschool children in the study found the constrained sentences easier to comprehend. (Author/CFM)