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The Development of Competence in an Exceptional Language Structure in Older Children and Young Adults
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Kramer, Pamela E.; And Others – Child Development, 1972
Subjects between 8 and 20 years of age were tested for competence on an exception to a grammatical rule, the minimal distance rule. (Authors)
Descriptors: Age Differences, Language Acquisition, Language Research, Linguistic Competence
Surface Structure and the Topic-Comment Distinction: A Developmental Study
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Hornby, Peter A. – Child Development, 1971
In this study the part of the sentence which constitutes what the speaker is talking about is called the topic" of the sentence, and the rest of the sentence is the comment", which provides new information about the topic. (Author/MB)
Descriptors: Age Differences, Elementary School Students, Function Words, Language Acquisition
Children's Comprehension of Relativized English Sentences
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Brown, H, Douglas – Child Development, 1971
Results imply that in early childhood education the language of test instructions and reading programs could be better geared to the child's linguistic competence. (Author)
Descriptors: Child Language, Comprehension, Data Analysis, Language Acquisition
The Concepts of Topic and Subject in First Language Acquisition of Mandarin Chinese.
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Chien, Yu-Chin; Lust, Barbara – Child Development, 1985
Reveals that young children acquiring Mandarin Chinese differentiate subject from topic, even though Chinese is a "topic-prominent" language. Data are based on results of a standardized, elicited imitation test of 95 Chinese children in Taiwan. Subjects between 2 years, 6 months and 5 years of age responded to coordinate as well as…
Descriptors: Child Language, Foreign Countries, Form Classes (Languages), Language Acquisition
Structural Aspects of Maternal Speech to Infants Reared in Poverty.
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Adams, Judith L.; Ramey, Craig T. – Child Development, 1980
Patterns of speech from lower socioeconomic status mothers to their infants were analyzed to determine correlations with infant risk of mental retardation. Measures of maternal language included sentence form, amount of speech, and syntactic complexity. The proportion of imperatives was positively correlated with risk status and negatively…
Descriptors: Economically Disadvantaged, Individual Differences, Infants, Intelligence Quotient