Slobin's (1996) "thinking for speaking" hypothesis has been recently adopted by second language researchers as a valuable lens from which to examine the complexities of possible conceptual restructuring during interlanguage development. This paper reviews a sample of studies analyzing the linguistic and conceptual patterns observed in…

The debate about the subject specificity of university language tuition has been going on for decades; it has mostly been discussed in the context of English for Academic Purposes. This paper considers the case for disciplinary specificity with regard to languages other than English. Few, if any, developed curricula, syllabuses, suitable textbooks…

This dissertation investigates how distributional information in the speech stream can assist infants in the initial stages of acquisition of their native language phonology. An exploratory statistical analysis derives this information from the adult speech data in the corpus of conversations between adults and young children in Russian. Because…

Reports on two studies on the acquisition by children of the voicing contrast in Mexican Spanish word-initial stops. The first was a longitudinal study. One analysis showed children unable to distinguish between voiced-voiceless stop cognate pairs at age 3;10. A spirantization analysis, however, more clearly revealed the children's phonological…

Purpose: In this study, the authors investigated speech rhythm acquisition by bilingual Spanish-English-speaking children, comparing their performance with functionally monolingual peers in both languages and to monolingual and bilingual adults. Method: Participants included younger children (3;9 [years;months] to 4;5.15 [years;months.days]),…

This paper examines the acquisition of English fricatives and is a preliminary report on one aspect of the Child Phonology Project at Stanford University. A characterization of English fricatives is presented, followed by a summary of current information on their acquisition. Three sample hypotheses from the Stanford project are discussed in…

Analysis of longitudinal data from four Mexican-American children to explore two aspects of the acquisition of Spanish word stress indicates that children approach such learning unbiased toward any particular stress type. Children's attention to phonetic or semantic aspects of normatively unstressed syllables leads them to shift stress to that…

Reports on a longitudinal study of the acquisition of the voicing contrast in American English word-initial stop consonants as measured by voice-onset time. The rate and nature of the developmental process are discussed in relation to two competing models of phonological acquisition and two hypotheses regarding the skills being learned. (Author/AM)

Shorter version of this paper was read as The Interpretation of Phonological Features in Assimilation Rules'' at the First Annual California Linguistic Conference, Berkeley, May 1-2, 1971. (VM)

Cultural deprivation has been found to affect the acquisition, development, and utilization of language for the child. The influences of environmental variables on language patterns are discussed as a series of conditioned responses reinforced in the developmental process. (Author)

Part one of this study discussed the characteristics of errors involving single fricative consonants made by English children learning their first language. Here, the second part discusses the distinctive features of the single fricatives most commonly mispronounced, as well as the characteristics of errors with clustered fricatives. (34…

A distinction is made between the acquisition of phonetics and of phonology. Their interaction and the ways in which they interfere with each other are discussed. Data on the acquisition of English fricatives for several children are given, and are analyzed separately for the phonological and phonetic aspects of acquisition. (Author/CLK)

A study was conducted of the development of consonant clusters in the phonology of a native English-speaking child. His progress was studied over a year and a half period, in three one-month segments. His speech was recorded by tape and transcribed. Techniques used to elicit consonant clusters included real word imitation, imitation of nonsense…

Distinctive feature specification and representation in phonological acquisition are examined in 30 children in the context of underspecification theory. Three questions were addressed: which features do children use to categorize segmental information; do the defining features of a category shift as the phonological system advances; and which…