Understanding the changes in our language abilities along the lifespan is a crucial step for understanding the aging process both in normal and in abnormal circumstances. Besides controlled experimental tasks, it is equally crucial to investigate language in unconstrained conversation. I present an information-theoretical analysis of a corpus of…

This study aims to describe in detail the linguistic skills of a large group of SLI participants. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of age-related effects on their linguistic performance and to whether a linguistic assessment of a narrative task can capture language impairments that might not be adequately pointed out by standardized…

Reports on a study to determine the origin, development, and use of the comparative in children ages 2-7. The role of adult-child interaction in acquisition is discussed. Tabulated results show that the comparative is used infrequently by young children. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Special issue devoted to research and the teaching of French in the elementary school. (VM)

A study was conducted in which a series of stories was used to teach six four- to five-year-olds to identify objects as "nouns," attributes of objects as "adjectives," and actions as "verbs." All the children appeared to have well-formed semantic fields for the three form classes. (Author/RM)

A study made to examine the development in production of the English verbal auxiliary and copula (VAC) "to be" compared a group of children with language dysfunction and a group of normal children. Two purposes were to see whether developmental differences are qualitative or quantitative and to calculate the importance of the VAC in language…

Adapted from "Work in Progress" n5, 1972, Department of Linguistics, University of Edinburgh. (DD)

This study is an attempt to investigate the efficacy of using existing semantic relations categories for understanding how children comprehend the verb "with" + noun construction. (Author)

Examines the relationship between language acquisition and current linguistic theory, with specific reference to Chomsky's work. Linguistic areas that should be explored in relation to acquisition are suggested, including regional dialect studies, the place of sociolinguistic factors in acquisition, and syntax. Suggestions as to how to analyze…

To determine the normal sequence of the development of Spanish phonology and Spanish grammatical patterns in the speech of native Spanish speakers, ages 2-5, a study of the acquisition of interrogative formation was undertaken. Two male and two females from each of nine age intervals between two and five were selected as informants; all were…

Revised version of an article which appeared in the June 71 Bulletin" of the Centre de Recherche de l'Education Specialisee et de l'Adaptation Scolaire. (VM)

Noam Chomsky's theory of grammar, or more specifically his theory of syntax, proposes to describe all possible English sentences through an explanation of how the native speaker generates sentences. It is the study of one's competence that offers insights into how language is acquired and how the rules and generalizations of that language are…

The problems of the education of the aurally handicapped were discussed in speeches presented at the convention of the Council for Exceptional Children in Chicago, 1970. Papers reported include a suggested approach to the evaluation of expressive oral syntactic competence of the aurally handicapped child by Jean Lehman, the language of children…

Following a review of the attempts of researchers like Walter Loban, Kellogg Hunt, Roy O'Donnell, Raymond Norris, and William Griffin to measure the syntactic complexity of the language of school-age children, several inferences are made in this study about the assumptions these investigators have made about the nature of language and of the…