Poverty of the stimulus has been at the heart of ferocious and tear-filled debates at the nexus of psychology, linguistics, and philosophy for decades. This review is intended as a guide for readers without a formal linguistics or philosophy background, focusing on what poverty of the stimulus is and how it's been interpreted, which is…

The connections among language, writing system, and reading are part of what confronts a child in learning to read. We examine these connections in addressing how reading processes adapt to the variety of written language and how writing adapts to language. The first adaptation (reading to writing), as evidenced in behavioral and neuroscience…

The topic of bilingualism has aroused considerable interest in research on language acquisition in recent decades. Researchers in various fields, such as developmental psychology and psycholinguistics, have investigated bilingual populations from different perspectives in order to understand better how bilingualism affects cognitive abilities like…

The author considers controversial psycholinguistic problems in the study of first and second language acquisition, raising such questions as whether all children learn language in the same way, and whether all languages are learned in the same way. Her observations, based partially on observing her own bilingual child, suggest that the cenematic…

This paper outlines a proposal to cover four very early stages for the acquisition of negation systems in natural languages. It emphasizes the formal linguistic devices as the major variables that determine the various language-specific developmental sequences. (CHK)

In one experiment, children from 5 to 10 years of age played with puppets and responded to questions concerning the acquisition of one particular linguistic structure by children; in another series of experiments, both children and adults responded to questions regarding nonsense words in differentiating contexts--the focus of the discussion…

An attempt is made to reinterpret some psycholinguistic strategies applied to language education in the elementary school from the point of view of G. B. Vico's evolutionary theory. Basic Vichian principles are compared with contemporary educational viewpoints and a few pedagogical experiments. (20 references) (LB)

THE ACQUISITION OF LANGUAGE IS CONSIDERED AS A QUESTION OF SPECIFYING HOW CHILDREN'S CAPACITY FOR LANGUAGE INTERACTS WITH THEIR LINGUISTIC EXPERIENCE--THE INTERACTION TAKING THE FORM OF RELATING THE UNIVERSAL ASPECTS OF THE DEEP STRUCTURE TO THE IDIOSYNCRATIC ASPECTS OF THE SURFACE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE. THIS INTERACTION OCCURS IN THE ACQUISITION…

This work is an English translation of the author's classic "Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze," first published in 1941. It is considered the most representative and comprehensive of the author's phonological writings, dealing not only with phonological typology but related problems of language acquisition and phonemic regression…

A cross-section of language research at mid-century from the viewpoint of the psychologist, biologist, and anthropologist is offered in this book bearing on problems of (1) maturation, (2) social anthropology, (3) human biology, (4) experimental psychology, and (5) primary acquisition of speech and language. Five papers delivered at a symposium on…

THIS PAPER IS A STUDY OF A CHILD'S EARLIEST PRETRANSFORMATIONAL LANGUAGE ACQUISITION PROCESSES. A MODEL IS CONSTRUCTED BASED ON THE ASSUMPTIONS (1) THAT SYNTACTIC ACQUISITION OCCURS THROUGH THE TESTING OF HYPOTHESES REFLECTING THE INITIAL STRUCTURE OF THE ACQUISITION MECHANISM AND THE LANGUAGE DATA TO WHICH THE CHILD IS EXPOSED, AND (2) THAT…

"How does a child come to be able to relate his own experience to the formal means of communicating about that experience in the language to which he is exposed?" The author maintains that the innate predispositions that underlie the development of the cognitive ability to organize and structure experience also underlie the acquisition of the…

The author's purpose in this article is to discuss the aspects of language (especially the development of language in children) to which biological concepts are most appropriately applied. While results of past studies would seem to show that language development is contingent on specific language training, it is important to distinguish between…