Purpose: Most educational assessments tend to be constructed in a close-ended format, which is easier to score consistently and more affordable. However, recent work has leveraged computation text methods from the information sciences to make open-ended measurement more effective and reliable for older students. This study asks whether such text…

Across a diverse range of languages, children proceed through similar stages in their production of causal language: their initial verbs lack internal causal structure, followed by a period during which they produce causative overgeneralizations, indicating knowledge of a productive causative rule. We asked in this study whether a child not…

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of early verb inflection in child Slovenian from morphosyntactic and morphophonological perspectives. It centers on the phenomenon of root nonfinites, particularly the patterns of omission and substitution errors in verb inflection marking. It argues that every acquisition model needs to account…

A range of language use model is proposed as an alternative conceptual framework to a stage model of egocentric speech. The range of language use model is proposed to clarify the meaning of the term egocentric speech, to examine the validity of stage assumptions, and to explain the existence of contextual variation in the form of children's…

The purpose of this study was to describe the function-form relationships in a child's developing language by establishing a methodology for examining the child's early propositions and the predications which express them, identifying the points in the syntactic hierarchy at which different "meanings" are encoded, and investigating the…

On the basis of an analysis of several earlier classifications of language functions a three-dimensional classification is presented. It interprets the utterance in question in terms of 1) the speaker's intended influence on the listener, 2) the speaker's intentions and attitudes, and 3) the speaker's intentions with respect to the content of the…

A study was conducted to determine the efficacy of utilizing Leach's interrogation model as a means for analyzing question types used by mothers and their children's responses to various interrogative forms. Data analyzed consisted of language samples obtained from three preschool children and their mothers during mother-child interactions plus…

In response to earlier studies by Thompson and Chapman (1977) and Clark and Clark (1977), 16 middle-class and upper-class White children between 1.2 and 2.2 were tested for overextension in production and comprehension. (AM)

Social cognition refers to that ability which makes it possible for one to infer another's covert, inner psychological experiences and to interact with that individual accordingly (Shantz 1975; Flavell 1977). Piaget (1926) maintains that the ability to decenter socially and to take into account the perspective of another develops gradually as the…

Narratives of children from different Spanish-speaking backgrounds illustrate that children's atypical narrative performance may reflect individual or cultural differences. It is suggested that static assessments may not differentiate narrative differences from disorders. A dynamic assessment model to predict the child's true language learning…

Prepared as part of a series applying recent research in oral and written communication instruction to classroom practice, this booklet describes several classroom-based studies that have examined children's writing development and synthesizes what they have shown about the process. The first section of the booklet analyzes the term "writing…

This issue of The Journal of Social Issues is devoted to nine articles on the topic of bilingualism written by authorities in the fields of linguistics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and education. The authors and their topics are: (1) Dell Hymes, "Models of the Interaction between Language and Social Setting," (2) Joshua A. Fishman,…