Two claims about early stages of language development--that of a limitation on length of utterance and that of reduction rules which delete major constituents from simple sentences--are questioned. Supporting arguments are reviewed, and alternative explanations offered. (RM)

Various theories are presented in support of a rationist approach to linguistics. (Author/HP)

Paper presented at the convention of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Washington, D.C., February 1972. (RS)

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 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 paper, based on Rosenbaum's (1967) grammar of adult English, attempts to apply ideas of deep structure and transformations to child grammar. The main rules predicated include phrase structure rules, segment structure rules, contextual features, and transformational rules. In this approach, the role of transformations is to segment and place…

Article deals with the Osgood model of sign learning...and the Chomskian approach. Both...approaches are discussed in terms of their appropriateness with respect to teachers' questions about language development and language stimulation. (Author)

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…

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…

Comprehension of the quantifiers "some" and "all" was studied with 202 children, three to nine years old. Thirty-two quantifier sentences dealing with descriptions of circles and squares were presented to the children. Wooden objects were presented to some children to see if results were affected by the choice of abstract objects, but no…

This report examines the question of whether grammatical rules are globally learned and applied. It also attempts to determine the underlying word order in English as well as the developmental sequence of the acquisition of Aux. A sentence-repetition test using positive statements, positive questions, and negative questions was administered to 30…

The development of production and comprehension by one two-year-old girl of three Japanese constructions (passives, causatives, and "te moraw"), which have similar surface configurations "NP ga NP ni V ("rare"/ "sase"/ "te moraw") TENSE," is investigated through elicited imitations and responses to the investigator's questions about the content of…

An extreme view of language acquisition sees base structures as innate, and acquisition of the grammar of a particular language as a process of learning the transformation rules needed to get from base structures to surface structures of adult native speakers. Base structures are understood to most resemble simple-active-affirmative-declarative…