Changes in natural language environments of families receiving quantitative language feedback in Shanghai were investigated. Volunteer parents of 22 children aged 5 to 30 months were recruited from a hospital and a learning center. Quantitative measures of adult word count and conversational turns with children were collected regularly over 6…

This dissertation studies the acquisition of verb argument structure in the basilectal subvariety of Jakarta Indonesian (henceforth, bJI). There are two characteristics of bJI that potentially affect the acquisition of verb argument structure. First, bJI sentences can surface not only in the full frame but also in truncated frames. Second, the…

To assess children's capacities to effect appropriate "metaphoric links" and to discriminate among metaphors of varying appropriateness, a task probing verbal metaphoric skill was administered to subjects ranging in age from 4 to 19 years. (Author/RM)

Article focused on the acquisition of sign language by chimpanzees in comparison with the acquisition of spoken languages and sign languages by human children. (Editor/RK)

Reports on a study to determine the origin, development, and use of the comparative in children ages 2-7. The role of adult-child interaction in acquisition is discussed. Tabulated results show that the comparative is used infrequently by young children. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

This paper documents the methodological study which was undertaken to discover the best way to obtain high quality tape-recorded samples of casual, spontaneous speech from children in kindergarten through Grade 3. All children interviewed were from schools in areas qualifying for compensatory education programs under Title I of the Elementary and…

Examines the relationship of phonological characteristics of children's imitative utterances to the characteristics of spontaneous utterances in early stage I. The findings indicated that, while these imitative utterances were subject to the same production constraints, they were not subject to the same selection and avoidance rules operative in…

Proposes that phonological development involves the three fundamental processes of perception, organization and production. Acquisition proceeds by the suppression of natural phonological processes in a systematic fashion. Processes slide through a child's system, appearing first as constraints on perception, and later on organization and…

Special issue devoted to research and the teaching of French in the elementary school. (VM)

The normal" six-year old has control of all aspects of his language when he begins attending school. The teacher must expand these skills. (MF)

Based on a portion of author's Ph.D. dissertation, Communicative Development and Children's Answers to Questions," University of Wisconsin, 1970. (Author/RD)

In dealing with the differences between the school and non-school language of Black children, the author uses a contingency grammar," which considers all speakers of a language to have the identical linguistics competence but includes a level of systematic performance" to account for dialectal and other systematic differences. (FB)

An overview of bilingualism and language acquisition is followed by a description of a research study of the simultaneous acquisition of Spanish and English in three children. (RM)

A study was conducted in which a series of stories was used to teach six four- to five-year-olds to identify objects as "nouns," attributes of objects as "adjectives," and actions as "verbs." All the children appeared to have well-formed semantic fields for the three form classes. (Author/RM)

Suggests that there are no sharp distinctions among children's linguistic comprehension, production, and knowledge. Instead, all performance and understanding are embedded in a fluctuating, interrelated thought system. (PD)