THE AUTHORS HAVE CONCERNED THEMSELVES IN THIS STUDY WITH IMITATION AS A DEVICE BY WHICH THE INVESTIGATOR CAN LEARN ABOUT CHILD LANGUAGE. THE DATA EXAMINED ARE PART OF A LONGITUDINAL THREE-MONTH STUDY OF LINGUISTIC DEVELOPMENT IN A TWO-YEAR-OLD CHILD. THE REPORT IS BASED ON 1,000 ELICITED IMITATIONS. CERTAIN PHENOMONA WERE OBSERVED GENERALLY WHEN…

Presents evidence from studies on adults' language processing and children's language acquisition that the lexicon is at the core of grammatical generalizations at several levels of representation. Proposes that phonological acquisition might provide the bootstrapping into grammatical generalization in general. Concludes that age-appropriate…

Investigated whether the rate and patterns of pronoun case error were influenced by the composition of an individual pronoun's paradigm. Twenty-nine children ages 2;6 to 4;0 years were audiotaped interacting with their primary caregivers in various settings. Results indicated that 27 children produced case errors. The composition of a pronoun's…

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…

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 collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 17 titles deal with the following topics: oral language characteristics of college freshmen; the language development of a modern day "wild child"; children's understanding of relational terms; the relationship of…

This is the final report of the project entitled "A Study to Determine the Degree of Relationship between Linguistic Concepts and Structures in French as a Mother Tongue and Stages of Psychological Readiness of Students at the Junior and Intermediate Levels." The project's primary aim was to determine the psychological readiness, with…

The collection of papers on language development and African-American children includes: "The Challenges of Conducting Language Research with African American Children" (Holly K. Craig); "Issues in Recruiting African American Participants for Research" (Joyce L. Harris); "Issues in Assessing the Language Abilities of…