Consonant harmony, a complex phonological assimilation in which segments (usually consonants, but sometimes even vowels) become identical, which occurs in the speech of young children and adult aphasics, is analyzed, particularly as it occurs in Finnish-speakers. Consonant harmony has an articulatory basis: it is a trend toward repetition of the…

A study investigated the encoding and decoding effects in English as a Second Language (ESL) and native English speaking (L1) students in Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada), by isolating the difficulties due to encoding and decoding in these students. The study examined specifically whether there are significant decoding effects based on…

Miniaturized computer technology can raise both language and education beyond the current capacity to understand. Children's learning is more complex, powerful, and subtle than it is usually given credit for, and language is more elaborate and intricate than is generally realized. Computers must be used carefully, but they offer many…

The goal of instruction in mainstream dialect (MD) acquisition should be to expand students' oral communication skills to include skills needed for academic and economic success, thereby making alternate dialect speakers bidialectic. This implies recognizing students' home dialect as a valid linguistic system and a part of their identity. Although…

The active/passive system of English grew out of a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) system where the fundamental distinction was between active and middle voices. The middle voice included within its functions the relationship that now would be known as passive. The PIE voice system is preserved in ancient Greek and Sanskrit, and in the former, the…

A common assumption underlying cross-linquistic studies in child language is that the comparison of any feature in unrelated languages may simplify semantic-grammatical complexities in a way that studies on a single language cannot. This paper begins by discussing the order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes in Spanish by four…

Investigators agree that mothers employ a variety of request forms and that children seem to be able to respond to these forms with a remarkable degree of accuracy. It is suggested that the speech of mothers to their children is filled with requests which are really not requests at all. It is shown that many of what appear to be adult requests to…

This study proposes that children's phonological behavior at Stage VI of sensorimotor development may show markedly decreased variability compared to children at Stage V. According to Piaget, sensorimotor development during Stage VI is distinguished from preceding stages by the onset of representational ability and ability to form mental…

This investigation studied the development of the form and function of negative sentences, and how it relates to the input on negation that children receive from their parents. The data came from three children: two from a previous study (Bellugi) and one the son of the investigators. A detailed analysis was carried out of the syntactic form and…

This study considers the interaction of syntactic and pragmatic factors (social and cognitive) in children's production of coordinate structures involving conjunction reduction. Two aspects of pragmatic context were considered: (1) the pattern of uncertainty or redundancy in a complex action sequence, and (2) the perceptual grouping of objects…

A PILOT STUDY WAS CONDUCTED TO DEFINE THE CHARACTER OF SPEECH MATERIAL IN VISUALLY PERCEPTUAL TERMS AND TO APPLY THE DEFINED CONCEPTS TO THE PROCESS OF INDUCED LANGUAGE ACQUISITION BY THE DEAF AND HARD-OF-HEARING. ITS PURPOSE WAS TO BUILD A CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATION FOR THE LATER DEVELOPMENT OF A COMPREHENSIVE RESEARCH PROGRAM, LEADING TO THE…

The relationship between developing oral language skills and reading skills was examined in a study involving 65 fifth and sixth grade children. The subjects' reading ability was tested on the comprehension and accuracy scales of a standardized reading test. The oral language measure was a recall task for verbal material of varying linguistic…

A three-year study of the linguistic and metalinguistic performance of forty Mexican-American children ranging in age from three to eleven years shows that it is useful to characterize the competence of the bilingual in terms of a unified system of rules, at least at one level of analysis. This paper explores some aspects of the grammatical…

This is a study of the processes involved in second language learning in which the principal subject was an Iranian child who learned English in the United States without formal instruction. Some of the questions dealt with in this study include: what motivates language learning in a child; what makes the linguistic structure of a language more or…

This paper summarizes the findings of three studies used to develop a language assessment instrument and to explore the relationships between language, cognitive development, and reading achievement in poor children. A sentence repetition task provided scores for function word omission, function word correct and reconstruction word correct. These…