The study used naturalistic data on the production of nominal prefixes in the Otopamean language Northern Pame (autonym: Xi'iuy) to test Whole Word (constructivist) and Minimal Word (prosodic) theories for the acquisition of inflection. Whole Word theories assume that children store words in their entirety; Minimal Word theories assume that…

The Mayan language Mam uses complex predicates to express events. Complex predicates map multiple semantic elements onto a single word, and consequently have a blend of lexical and phrasal features. The chameleon-like nature of complex predicates provides a window on children's ability to express phrasal combinations at the one-word stage of…

One strategy that children might use to sort words into grammatical categories such as noun and verb is distributional bootstrapping, in which local co-occurrence information is used to distinguish between categories. Words that can be used in more than one grammatical category could be problematic for this approach. Using naturalistic corpus…

Generative approaches to language have long recognized the natural link between theories of knowledge representation and theories of knowledge acquisition. The basic idea is that the knowledge representations provided by Universal Grammar enable children to acquire language as reliably as they do because these representations highlight the…

Presents experimental evidence supporting the assertion that successive single-word utterances share certain suprasegmental characteristics with multiple-word utterances and that they are therefore not single words but the first manifestation of syntax in speech. (AM)

A study investigated the order of acquisition of inflectional morphology in English within morphemes, focusing on late acquisition of one allomorph of the plural. It is proposed that late acquisition is rooted in the operation of the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP), which states that at the melodic level, adjacent identical elements are…

A study investigated the hypothesis that children learning Spanish as a first language learn rules for assigning stress, as opposed to simply memorizing stress for individual words. The subjects were 50 Spanish-speaking preschool children. In one portion of the experiment, they imitated sets of 2, 3, or 4 Spanish nonsense words that were…

This paper deals with methods and models appropriate to the systematic linguistic study of the child's acquisiton of phonology. Sections I through IV present a review of previous studies in the field, discuss the usefulness of the concept of "innateness," discriminate between phonetic and phonological ability, and discuss the concept of discrete…

This volume is a prepublication edition of four papers presented at a briefing held for representatives of government agencies, foundations and other organizations, November 12, 1970 at the National Museum of History and Technology of the Smithsonian Institution. "Linguistics as a Pilot Science," by Joseph H. Greenberg, examines the impact which…

The proceedings include the following papers: "Why We Study Child Language"; "Children's Use of Information in Word Learning"; "An Examination of the Initial Mapping of Verb Meanings"; "Evidence for the VP Constituent from Child Korean"; "The Role of Stress, Position, and Intonation in the…

This paper reports on a study in which twenty young adults were tested for their ability to accurately reproduce the articulatory and prosodic features of three non-Indo-European languages in which they had received instruction. The first of two basic goals of this research was to test, at the purely phonetic level, the "critical period for…

This volume is a collection of articles on various aspects of applied linguistics as it relates to language teaching. Chapter 1, by S. Pit Corder, entitled "Applied Linguistics and Language Teaching," gives a short, general survey of applied linguistics in language teaching. Chapters 2-5 give an account of the main concepts in what is now called…

This paper reviews current literature concerning the development of children's comprehension of the processes of natural languages and it recommends a new study approach designed to evaluate the joint effects of lexical and syntactic devices on comprehension. It discusses three main kinds of investigations--studies of the comprehension of…

A collection of essays marking the retirement of Ilse Lehiste, chair of the Department of Linguistics at Ohio State University (1967-71 and 1985-87) includes the following contributions by her colleagues: "On Incomplete Mutations in Breton"; "Perceived P-Center Location in English and Japanese"; "Ordering Paradoxes and…

Research papers on language and linguistics include: "Enchainement des mots et acces au lexique en francais" ("Word Order and Lexical Access in French") (Besson); "L'apport de la coarticulation dans la perception de consonnes occlusives et constrictives" ("The Contribution of Coarticulation to the Perception of…