Assesses the interrelations among the functional properties of maternal speech, the structural properties of maternal speech, and child language growth for a period of six months for 22 two-year-old children and their mothers. (HOD)

Analysis of a one-year-old's lexical development suggested factors causing overextensions: using known words for more recently acquired or unknown words; expressing incomplete knowledge of defining features of two or more similar meaning words; producing overextensions of preferred words; using phonologically simpler more than difficult words; and…

Illustrates how children constantly solve communication puzzles in the course of language acquisition and offers suggestions for teachers and parents to assist children in their understanding of language. (HTH)

Investigated the relationship between children's failures to produce unambiguous utterances and the mental effort demands in children (ages five, six, seven, and nine years), using finger-tapping and message production tasks, separately and simultaneously. Findings suggest that the relative effort requirements of communication decrease with…

The language of 29 Canadian children was sampled during the first two years of schooling in free conversations and in more formal school-like tasks as part of a three-year longitudinal study of the properties of oral language and their relation to other measures of cognitive, linguistic, and reading performance. The language samples were subjected…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 20 titles deal with the following topics: the role of crib talk in language acquisition; syntactic parsing strategies; a case study of the first use of words; how two modes of literature presentation affect oral language…

Suggesting that perhaps teachers have been overlooking the role of drawing in children's communication development by concentrating on the verbal aspects of language, this paper discusses aspects of verbal and graphic language and looks at the interrelationships between these elements in the process of communication. Selected picture stories of a…

The interlanguage hypothesis stresses that errors are a normal part of the language learning process. At the same time, in the view of many, the teacher has a responsibility to provide short cuts for the learner through appropriate corrective feedback. Conventionally, this has been taken to imply correction of expression by requiring repetition of…

It is possible to communicate effectively in a second language in spite of highly deviant pronunciation and grammar as long as messages are semantically coherent and message forms are reasonably appropriate. Until now, research in second language acquisition has focused principally on the processes through which non-native speakers move towards…