Flexibility and productivity are hallmarks of human language use. Competent speakers have the capacity to use the words they know to serve a variety of communicative functions, to refer to new and varied exemplars of the categories to which words refer, and in new and varied combinations with other words. When and how children achieve this…

According to Crain and Nakayama (1987), when forming complex yes/no questions, children do not make errors such as "Is the boy who smoking is crazy?" because they have innate knowledge of "structure dependence" and so will not move the auxiliary from the relative clause. However, simple recurrent networks are also able to avoid…

Investigates the differences in syntactical structure of sentences written by school children of different ages and of different abilities within the same grade. Writing of certain adults is also studied. (MH)

By the fifth grade no differences were found between the order of adjectives in a sentence preferred by children and by adults. (ED/JD)

Demonstrates that an understanding of children's language-acquisition difficulties with a wide range of syntactic constructions should be derived from limitations on the child's ability to deal with processing load and formal representational complexity. Maintains this can be done only in the context of a view of syntactic representation…

This book focuses on the nature and development of knowledge concerning grammar and the meanings coded by grammar. This knowledge is inferred from performance, from sentences and the settings in which they are spoken, and from signs of comprehension or incomprehension of sentences by preschool children. The first two stages of linguistic…

The verbal behavior of three children was sampled. The samples were analyzed to obtain a picture of three stages of the children's language development, specifically the interrogative structures. Each stage was about 4- or 5-months long, starting at the 18th to 28th month, depending upon the child's level of linguistic ability. The interrogative…

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…

Fourteen specifically language-impaired children, age four to seven, pointed to pictures in, and acted out, semantically reversible sentences that varied in thematic content and in the order of thematic roles. Compared to children matched on language age and chronological age, subjects' comprehension was significantly lower. (Author/JDD)

Five- and seven-year-old English and Spanish speaking children were tested on short term memory, perceptual matching, and referential communication tasks to determine the relationship between linguistic coordination and language group. English speakers had significantly lower performance on the communication and perceptual tasks. (Author/APM)

The syntactic properties of the child's language are studied. Within the framework of transformational grammar, the rules of syntax can be divided into three types: base- or phrase-structure rules, transformational rules, and morphological rules. Each of these rules is discussed. It is stated that the one process that appears to characterize each…

Language acquisition in children, ages 6 to 10 years, and their linguistic competence with respect to complex aspects of English syntax, are studied. The nature of specific disparities between adult and child grammar are discussed, and the gradual reduction of these disparities as the children's knowledge of language increases is traced. In all,…

This report describes in two volumes the proceedings of a conference on the perception of language held at the University of Pittsburgh in January, 1968. The objectives of the conference, to present the particular research interests of the participants and to attempt to find points of concurrence in thinking through discussion of the conference…