This paper provides an overview of recent developments in the science of linguistics, and considers their relevance to the teaching of Spanish in Puerto Rico. First, three significant trends are explained and summarized: (1) structuralism, which emphasizes phonetics, pattern, and distribution, and rejects meaning as a tool of analysis; (2)…

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…

The basic-operations hypothesis predicts that for any transformation which is composed of more than one basic operation, there exists a class of errors in children's speech correctly analyzed as failure to apply one (or more) of the operations specified in the adult formulation of the rule. (Author/CTM)

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…