The project described in this report examines the development of Swedish-speaking children's syntax from the appearance of the first two-work sentences until all the basic syntactical rules are mastered. The procedures and techniques for the experiment are described and preliminary findings are discussed. Children practice language by repeating an…

Drawing upon recent research findings and upon a case study of a child learning to talk and to read, the author outlines the important similarities in the development of both language and literacy. The characteristics of parent-child interaction which support language acquisition--semantic contingency, scaffolding, accountability procedures, and…

Longitudinal and cross-sectional studies of young English-, French-, and Korean-speaking children showed that, across the three languages, children go through three similar developmental stages before they acquire the adult system of answering negative questions. Several language-specific phenomena were observed. (BC)

Reports preliminary findings of an ongoing study of prosodic mixes in the speech of three trilingual siblings. The children are primary bilinguals in Portuguese and Swedish, and acquired English as the language of schooling. Prosodic mixes are defined as the intrusion of prosodic patterns of one language into another.(Author/VWL)

This article concludes a forum that considered theoretical and analytical frameworks applied to developing systems in phonological theory and treatment. It discusses the role of complexity in target selection of children with language impairments: error pattern interaction and complexity; complexity, treatment, and constraint demotion; and…

This study examined the development of metaprocessing abilities in children with varying degrees of language abilities and sought to determine if the patterns of metaprocessing development that emerged were similar for these ability groups. Subjects were 141 children ages 4-5 at the beginning of the study, divided into a control group, a low…

Papers in this volume include the following: "Constraints on Dative Acquisition by Chinese ESL Learners" (Hua Dong Fan); "The Learnability of Locality Conditions on Quantification" (Thomas Lee); "Do Learning Environments Make a Difference? A Study on the Acquisition of the English Interrogatives by Three Types of Cantonese…

Language development and dialect are measures of influences upon a student's ability to learn to read. It has been observed that students whose language differs from that used in schools and in the materials of instruction are often found in remedial reading classes. Their difficulty lies in attempting to learn to read a language which is…

This study attempts to assess the developmental psycholinguistics hypothesis that language acquisition strategies are universal. Four types of statements were focused upon: (1) true affirmative statements (e.g., "You are a child"), (2) false affirmative statements ("You are a baby"), (3) false negative statements ("You aren't a child"), and (4)…

One of the most remarkable aspects of the babbling of some babies is that it is produced with intonation contours that sound very much like adult sentence melodies. This study reviews the literature and examines longitudinal data collected from seven children. Some of the non-adult-like syntactic uses made of intonation by children for…

A study of overregularized use of verbs by two children over a period when they were 2 1/2 to 5 years of age shows overregularizations in two directions: non-causative verbs were used as causatives; and causative verbs were used non-causatively. According to terminology from logic, predicates were classified according to the number of noun-phrase…

THE EXTENT TO WHICH REDUNDANCY OF LANGUAGE AFFECTS THE DIFFICULTY OF LEARNING VERBAL MATERIALS FOR CHILDREN OF SEVERAL AGES WAS STUDIED. SAMPLES OF SPOKEN LANGUAGE APPROPRIATE TO CHILDREN OF FIRST, THIRD, AND FIFTH GRADES AND ADULTS (AS REPRESENTED BY JUNIOR COLLEGE STUDENTS) FROM SIMILAR SOCIOECONOMIC BACKGROUNDS WERE COLLECTED BY MEANS OF A TAPE…

The creative oral language elicited from 45 preoperational and 40 concrete operational first grade students was analyzed to study the relationship between cognitive development and the types of case relationships produced. Each child's language was analyzed for eight noun/verb relationships, including state, process, action, experience, location,…

This paper summarizes the results of a longitudinal study of a child native speaker of French acquiring English. The observation period covered the child's progress from age 4 years, 9 months to age 5 years, 8 months. An analysis was made of the acquisition of the interrogative and negative structures and of nine grammatical morphemes. In…