The acquisition of the metalinguistic abilities involved in ambiguity detection and resolution was studied with children. It is suggested that metalinguistic abilities may serve as potential test measures for facility in learning a second language. School children (ages 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13) were tested for their ability to detect ambiguous…

This paper attempts to specify the ways in which bilingualism might affect cognitive functioning. Two general ways, the "linguistic" and the "non-linguistic," are distinguished. Linguistic explanations explain the effects of bilingualism on cognition as a direct result of the fact that the bilingual has access to two verbal…

The purpose of this research was to develop methods to study the effects of context on children's comprehension and production of temporal terms such as "before,""after,""next,""then," and "but first." A longitudinal study, using naturalistic and traditional laboratory methods, and three…

Twenty-four children aged five and twenty-four children aged six were interviewed individually three times during a calendar year. It was found that not only did the children's language develop over the period, as judged syntactically and lexically, but they also showed an increasingly fluent control over their own style. All the children…