Infants learn their language by first determining, independent of language, the meaning which a speaker intends to convey to them, and by then working out the relationship between the meaning and the expression they heard. (Author)

Preschool children aged 2.6 to 5.0 were presented with reversible active and passive sentences in four comprehension test settings. The children's response patterns were analyzed in terms of individual response patterns. Extralinguistic cues accounted for the most common patterns. (Author/AM)

This study was conducted to examine the acquisition of the meaning of the temporal conjunctions "before" and "after." The initial hypothesis was that in the acquisition of a word, the child learns its semantic components one at a time. The subjects were 40 school children attending the Bing Nursery School at Stanford…

It is the contention here that the "prelinguistic" period is an important phase of the language acquisition process. Accordingly the research reported represents an attempt to begin mapping out the types of linguistically relevant information to which a young child attends. Specifically it is hypothesized that young children are…

Active and passive sentences were presented with probable and improbable semantic content to 100 first graders and 100 kindergartners. "Irreversible" sentences were considered improbable. In a design employing syntax, probability, grade, and sex as factors, probability and syntax were found significant both as main effects and in their…

The major purpose of this paper is to initiate discussion on the validity of systematic phonemics in the area of language acquisition. This is not an attempt to write a phonology, but rather an outline of some theoretical and formal devices that may be used for gaining insight into the phonological system of the child. An evaluation procedure…

A phenomenon called "pragmatic variation" is discussed as a child's individual system of behavior in response to a question the child doesn't understand but realizes that he must verbalize an answer to. (NCR)

Five experiments are carried out to determine the comprehension of passives by children. Results obtained demonstrate that comprehension rests on knowledge of syntactic structure. V - NP were interpreted as verb-object. Passives lacking a preposition were interpreted as actives. Competence in passives may be at a high level before performance is…

The complexity of language of four, five, and six year old children was examined in a psycholinguistic study that attempted to differentiate the characteristics of sentences that were difficult for children to comprehend from those which were easy, and to discover whether children used a subject-verb-object (S-V-O) language strategy to interpret…

Intended as an introduction to psycholinguistics from the linguist's point of view, this book addresses itself to three main topics: the innateness of language, the relationship of linguistic knowledge to language usage, and the comprehension and production of speech. In 12 chapters, the book discusses the nature of language development, the…

This study investigated variables that might be associated with outcome differences in language development of 10 children (ages 10-20 months) with blindness or severe visual impairments, attending a developmental vision clinic in southern England. Subjects' early patterns of expressive language development were examined and related to observed…

This study of language development was intended to chart the developmental course of the spontaneous use of negatives and affirmatives by 1 1/2 - 3-year-olds in response to true or false statements concerning familiar objects, properties, and actions. Forty children, 18, 24, 30, and 36 months of age, were assessed for knowledge of the words used…

A study was conducted to compare the relative performance on yes-no questions of bilingual and monolingual children and to discuss the relationship of semantic development and linguistic development, both in the bilinguals and monolinguals. Eighteen English monolingual, eighteen Japanese monolingual, and eighteen Japanese-English bilingual…

Most studies of language acquisition overlook the fact that a child learns language in the context of acquiring the social skill of conversing known as "turn-taking." The few studies of verbal turn-taking in children suggest that prosodic features (suprasegmentals) and turn-taking skills are integrated by the age of two years, nine months, and…

Bilingual and monolingual children were presented with experimental conditions where response mode and semantic information was varied. Forty children, 20 in each language-type group, responded in the present progressive and the past tenses to a series of colored drawings of simple activities. Half of the subjects responded to the task under…