Data on four infants between the ages of 12 and 20 months were collected to answer two questions about children's communication behavior. (1) Is there a correspondence between communicative intentions expressed in gestures and vocal utterances? If both spring from common organismic tendencies, it should be possible to discern an "indicating"…

An annotated bibliography of materials that are useful in studying developmental pragmatics is presented. Two areas of pragmatics which are not included are referential communication and sociolinguistics. The annotations are brief and are intended to indicate the general content of the entry, but not experimental results or overall quality. Some…

This study addressed four questions raised in syntactic acquisition studies conducted by Carol Chomsky and others. Specifically, questions concerned the nature of syntactic structures in children's language repertoires, the uniformity and rate of acquisition of particular structures, the generalizability of the minimal-distance principle, and the…

Presented are rules of sign language structure which have provided a framework for linguistic analysis in a project studying the acquisition of sign language by 10 deaf children of deaf parents. Two levels of rules are outlined: definition rules, which deal with definitions of terms used in the analysis and their relation to terms used in other…

Speech samples were collected from three 48-month-old children with Down's Syndrome over an 11-month period after Ss had reached the one word utterance stage. Each S's linguistic utterances were semantically evaluated in terms of M. Bowerman's, R. Brown's, and I. Schlesinger's semantic relational concepts. Generally, findings suggested that Ss…

The purpose of this study was to discover: (1) whether or not adults can discriminate between the babbling of babies learning different languages, and (2) the approximate age at which discrimination is possible. There were two tests involved in the experiment. The identification test consisted of 20 babbling samples, each of which was 15 seconds…

Piaget has suggested that a child's language reflects the degree to which he is able to take into account the point of view of his listener. His inability to do so results in what Piaget calls egocentric speech whereas what Piaget calls socialized speech indicates that the child actually adopts his listener's viewpoint and engages in an exchange…

Looks at phonological development in lexical terms and extends the method of Ferguson and Farwell to consideration of syllables within words. The research is directed toward the question of whether children acqure a sound system by following "universal" orders of acquistion or by developing distinct strategies. (EJS)

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

This monograph presents a descriptive analysis of the syntactic patterns in 16 corpora of word combinations from 11 infants learning either English (six children), Samoan, Finnish, Hebrew, or Swedish. The mean utterance lengths range up to about 1.7 morpehmes. There are both reanalyses of corpora in the literature and new corpora. The data…

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…

In three experimental studies of children aged 3 to 6, training was shown to improve both the mastery of grammatical rules and linguistic correctness. (MS)

Sessions of verbal interaction (N=22) significantly facilitated syntax acquisition by 32- to 40-month-olds. In response to children's sentences, experimenters replied with recast sentences that maintained the same meaning but provided new syntactic information. A selective bias in these replies was matched by selectively stronger facilitation in…

Revised version of a paper delivered at the 5th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Language and Linguistic Studies, Ann Arbor, Michigan, October 20-21, 1972. Assistance provided through a Summer Faculty Fellowship, University of California, San Diego, and the Phonology Laboratory at Berkeley (supported in part by a National Science…