We present a series of experiments investigating English-speaking children's comprehension of "it"-clefts and "wh"-pseudoclefts. Previous developmental work has found children to have asymmetric difficulties interpreting object clefts. We show that these difficulties disappear when clefts are presented in felicitous contexts,…

While previous sociolinguistic research has demonstrated that children faithfully acquire probabilistic input constrained by sociolinguistic and linguistic factors (e.g., gender and socioeconomic status), research suggests children regularize inconsistent input-probabilistic input that is not sociolinguistically constrained (e.g., Hudson Kam &…

Study attempted to find to what extent and in what manner the language patterns of a selected group of disadvantaged pupils differed from standard patterns. (Authors)

Explores how children's performance on picture description tasks in French, their limited-use language, compares to their performance on the same tasks in English. Investigates whether home language environment has an effect on performance. (SR)

The first half of this document reports on research that explores the ways in which knowledge of the world affects judgments of sentence acceptability. Sixty children in grades four through eight were studied at two times, one year apart. The subjects were first interviewed regarding their knowledge of the world in order to identify their role…

The results of this study argue . . . for a gradation within (basal reading) texts of sentence patterns and of elements used to fill the slots in those patterns"; based on author's doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1968. (Editor/RD)

Children aged six and eight were required to recall transitive sentences, some with an animate actor and inanimate acted-upon element, and some with these reversed. It appeared that children prefer to put the animate noun first and this affects their choice of active or passive sentence voice. (Author/SJL)

The development of linguistic politeness in 7- and 9-year-old Italian children was examined. A total of 80 subjects, 40 males and 40 females, produced requests according to different contexts which were graphically presented. Factors considered for such contexts were: sex of the speaker; sex of the addressee; status of the addressee, either peer…

This paper presents a study of metalinguistic awareness in young children. Metalinguistic awareness refers to the child's ability to concentrate on the sounds and patterns of language rather than on its communicative aspects. Metalinguistic awareness was studied by analyzing the verbal play and verbal games of 149 children from 6 months to 10…

THIS 7-YEAR LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF THE LANGUAGE SKILLS OF 338 OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, SCHOOL CHILDREN UTILIZES A SCIENTIFIC APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF BOTH THE SEMANTIC AND STRUCTURAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE. A SPECIFIC METHOD OF LANGUAGE ANALYSIS HAS BEEN SHAPED. THE "SEGMENTATION" METHOD OF ANALYSIS USES SEVERAL TYPES OF SENTENCE SEGMENTS. A…

A study was undertaken to see whether developmental patterns of language acquisition could be discovered in children beyond age five. Specifically, the study attempted to uncover a pattern in the development of the skill of stress interpretation, or the understanding of the effect of emphasis of a particular word on the deep structure of the…

A study investigated whether the phonological properties of visually represented words routinely influenced the process of lexical access. Subjects were 40 college students and 40 fourth graders. Results provide little support for the claim that the phonological attributes of words are used standardly to achieve lexical access. (Author/MSE)

The research reported in this paper concerns an initial study asking two questions: Is second language learning like first language learning? Is there a change in learning rate or process with age? A nonrandom sample of children aged 4 to 9 years was studied. Subjects were 31 English-speaking children in Geneva, Switzerland, who were in schools…