This dissertation studies the acquisition of Mandarin relative clauses (RCs), including the distributional pattern of different RC types in adult child-directed speech (study 1) and four-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's comprehension of different RC types (study 2). An RC is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun and is embedded within a…

Age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which people learn a particular item and the AoA effect refers to the phenomenon that early-acquired items are processed more quickly and accurately than those acquired later. Over several decades, the AoA effect has been investigated using neuroscientific, behavioral, corpus and computational…

Reading with an adult plays an important role in developing children's oral language skills, phonological awareness and print knowledge. Parental reading aloud is also an indicator of children's later academic success, which suggests that the practice may be further linked to children's development of broader academic skills and behaviour, such as…

The present study is an examination of the contribution of bilingualism to trilingualism, namely the influence of learning two different orthographies on learning a third. The participants were two groups of sixth graders from Israeli schools who were studying English as a foreign (second or third) language: Russian Israeli children for whom…

A language-in-context model is presented that integrates linguistic analysis of higher levels of organization in writing with analysis of student use of grammatical resources. Procedures for assessing student writing that are based on this model and used for diagnostic purposes are illustrated with texts by seven year olds. (23 references)…

Discusses the role that language plays in education, with particular focus on the importance of dialog in learning and teaching. Suggests that while there is need for agreement about the outcomes to be aimed for, and genuine concern for equity and improvement in standards, a full recognition of the value and problems of diversity and acceptance of…

The properties of written, textual language with which children deal in school can be distinguished from those of oral language by examining the manner in which interpersonal and logical functions are stressed and by assessing the degree to which interpretation is confined by meaning explicitly stated in textual matter. The developmental process…

This paper describes similarities between the areas of second language (L2) teacher education and mother tongue (MT) literacy teacher education: similarity of definition, similarity of history, and similarity of a current pedagogical issue (immersion is necessary but not sufficient). Practitioners in both fields need to modulate the sharp polarity…

Lev Vygotsky, in his book "Thought and Language," explores the relationship between thought and language. In school, children discover that there is a code (writing) that represents words. Writing is often difficult for students because it is an abstraction in which words are replaced by images of words, it is speech without an…

A study was conducted to examine syntactical development in spontaneous written language of selected preschool, kindergarten and first grade children. The two major experimental questions were: (1) Will there be development towards greater complexity in the syntax of spontaneous writing and how should it be described? (2) What transformational…

Theoretical aspects of the spectator role in James Britton's (1970) model of language use are explored within a perspective based primarily on the work of George Kelly, Susanne Langer, Jean Piaget, Michael Polanyi, and Denys Harding. This view is amplified in a series of empirical studies based on stories told by children between the ages of two…

THE DEFINITION OF THE WORD "LANGUAGE" CAN BE LIMITED TO MEAN "A VOCAL AND AUDITORY MEANS OF COMMUNICATION, WHICH WORKS BY THE SYMBOLIC PROCESS, WHICH HAS A COMPLEX STRUCTURE, AND WHICH IS CONSTANTLY CHANGING SO LONG AS IT REMAINS IN USE." THERE ARE SIX IMPLICATIONS OF THIS DEFINITION--(1) ALTHOUGH LANGUAGE IS PRIMARILY AUDITORY AND VOCAL, IT CAN…

In a study of first-language transfer and second-language (L2) acquisition of reflexive binding, the interpretation of English reflexives by native speakers of Serbo-Croatian was investigated using two types of written sentence comprehension tasks. Results support the transfer hypothesis and suggest learners have access to Universal Grammar in L2…

The relationship between developing oral language skills and reading skills was examined in a study involving 65 fifth and sixth grade children. The subjects' reading ability was tested on the comprehension and accuracy scales of a standardized reading test. The oral language measure was a recall task for verbal material of varying linguistic…

Broad and major concerns dealing with reading are set forth in this monograph to provoke discussion and examination by both researchers and practitioners. In Part 1, Kenneth S. Goodman presents a psycholinguistic view of language and reading (within a transformational-generative framework) as essentially a set of processes of recoding, decoding,…