This paper attempts to show the relationship between variable rules and more widely used psycholinguistic constructs such as amalgams and schemas, and to point out how variationists' methods can be useful in the study of language acquisition. The traditional rule, the rule for forming the past tense of regular verbs in English, is discussed as it…

A schizophrenic boy was studied longitudinally with regard to language behavior and hierarchic integration during 13 10-minute interviews, at 3-month intervals commencing at age 3 1/2 years and ending at 7 years of age. (Author/MC)

The ability to produce and recognize paraphrases is necessary for a child's linguistic development. The purpose of this paper is to explain how three basic sentence types interact with age in determining the strategy a child uses in producing paraphrases. Three paraphrase strategies considered are lexical substitution, syntactic rearrangement, and…

The work described in this paper was undertaken to study children's ability to preserve semantic relations during analogical mappings. Two experiments are described based on the understanding that metaphors and analogies are mappings from one semantic region (the domain of origin) to another (the range of application), which convey the idea that…

The crib talk reported here of a 2;2-2;4-year-old boy replicates the phenomenon of crib talk reported in previous studies by other investigators. This study adds a corpus of mother-child interaction (MCI) and tests one aspect of the hypothesis that crib talk may enhance production of linguistic forms at a later date. Transcripts of monologues were…

Forty-eight nursery school and kindergarten children participated in a study of concept learning. The study focused on children's use of intensional and extensional information in the acquisition of basic and superordinate categories. The intension of a concept is its definition or set of defining attributes; its extension is the set of all…

A study was undertaken to determine whether children in early periods of language development use stress with any regular patterns, and if so, on what the patterns are based. The subjects were five children aged 21-29 months, MLU between 1.3 and 2.4. Tape recordings were made during play sessions with each child. Two-word utterances that could be…

This report examines the question of whether grammatical rules are globally learned and applied. It also attempts to determine the underlying word order in English as well as the developmental sequence of the acquisition of Aux. A sentence-repetition test using positive statements, positive questions, and negative questions was administered to 30…

Some aspects of a theory of grammar are presented which derive from a formal theory of language acquisition. One aspect of the theory is a universal constraint on analyzability known as the Freezing Principle, which supplants a variety of constraints proposed in the literature. A second aspect of the theory is the Invariance Principle, a…

The annual bulletin of the French 8 section of the Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association of America is presented with the texts of papers read at both the 1969 and 1970 sessions. The 1970 papers, in French, include Jean Louis Darbelnet's "Etude Sociolinguistique des contacts entre 1'Anglais et le Francais au Canada et en…

The ADD (Auditory Discrimination in Depth) Test measures the auditory perceptions basic to grasping the logic of the English writing and reading system. If the level of a subject's auditory perception--his ability to discriminate the phonemes of English and his ability to code phonemic sequences in both non-syllabic and syllabic units--can be…

The language patterns of low socioeconomic Negro, Spanish-surname, and Anglo children are sufficiently different from the middle class language patterns used in schools to put these children at a distinct educational disadvantage. By comparing the speech patterns of these children, this study sought to determine whether their language development…

Children's language abilities develop in a predetermined order, one stage necessarily preceding the next. The rate of this development remains relatively the same for physiologically normal human beings. Through research it is becoming possible to identify critical periods in linguistic development. Teachers could utilize and exploit these growth…

This speech is based on a theory earlier proposed by the author that orthographic presentation of English is much like the abstract base of language which an individual uses in forming strategies for reading. Thus, his ability to read depends upon his facility with his language. An important implication for schools is that, given this theory, all…

This paper discusses findings from a study of the speech patterns of 10 mothers interacting with their own younger child, their own older child, and with an adult. Results are discussed in terms of the temporal-acoustic pattern and content of the mothers' speech. Two claims are made about the kinds of speech a child hears: (1) The flow of speech…