THE AUTHOR FEELS THAT TO APPROACH CHILD LANGUAGE TRANSFORMATIONALLY IS TO USE A TECHNIQUE SUITED TO PROVIDING ADDITIONAL INSIGHT INTO A WELL-KNOWN LANGUAGE FOR TREATING AN UNKNOWN, OR AT BEST LITTLE KNOWN LANGUAGE. SHE MAKES THE FOLLOWING CRITICISMS OF TRANSFORMATIONAL ANALYSIS OF CHILD LANGUAGE--(1) NOTHING CAN BE DIRECTLY INFERRED WITH REGARD TO…

This paper represents a partial condensation of the results of a study covering 14 months in a Russian-speaking child's phonological development. Evidence supports a theory of phonological acquisition formulated by Olmsted (1971), and offers detailed information on the child's acquisition of specific phones. (CHK)

The purpose of this paper is to examine the status of deictic reference in the speech of 19 three-year-old Black children. The deictic verbs of motion are examined with reference to other aspects of the deictic system. The data for this study are approximately eight hours of spontaneous speech collected in a pre-school classroom. The hypothesis to…

Traditionally linguists have considered pidgin languages as corrupted constructions of European vocabulary based on African or Asian syntax. Recent systematic studies of these languages show complex patterns of mutual influence on many levels. To explain the structural similarities of pidgin languages, some linguists, such as Keith Whinnom, have…

Noting that linguistics and the neurological sciences have developed independently, this paper presents a coordinated approach to man's understanding of language, cognition, and mind. A neurological model is developed following a discussion of the rationale of such an approach. Chapters include: (1) the relation of neurological evidence to models…

This paper reports on a longitudinal study of the acquisition of the voicing contrast in English word-initial stop consonants, as measured by voice onset time. Four monolingual children were recorded at two week intervals, beginning when the children were about 1;6. Data provided evidence for three general stages: (1) the child has no contrast;…

A question of both theoretical and practical importance for the study of phonological development is whether there is a difference in the status of productions rendered spontaneously by the child and those repeated by the child after either an adult model or his own production. The relevant theoretical questions are: (1) Are all the child's…

A study was conducted to test whether three, four, and five-year-old children would be better able to use either static or dynamic properties for grouping objects, and whether performance under these conditions would be better than when no property was given. One of the two study tasks, the free sort, also used by Rosch et al. (1976), asked…

An interactionist-discovery theory of child phonology is proposed based on the following tenets: children invent their own phonological rules, and phonetic mastery is not automatically or generally in step with learning about phonemic contrasts. When a child learns the sound pattern of a language, there is constant interaction between the…

Factor analysis accounts for most of the variance in adult ratings of concepts with adjectives. Affective reactions are present in young infants, but still to be explored is how the stable adult factor structure develops from these reactions. Three questions are investigated in this study: (1) is this factor structure present in 3- and…

A common assumption underlying cross-linquistic studies in child language is that the comparison of any feature in unrelated languages may simplify semantic-grammatical complexities in a way that studies on a single language cannot. This paper begins by discussing the order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes in Spanish by four…

The acquisition of the consonant system by a child acquiring Mexican-Spanish as her native language is described. During the earliest stages (from 1;7 to 2;1 years of age), the data showed several phenomena that could best be accounted for by assuming a central role for the word as the basic unit being acquired. The evidence for the centrality of…

This paper proposes a broad outline of a variable model of language development and explores several particulars of such a model in the language behavior of four two-year-old children. The process by which information about language is progressively transformed and integrated rather than merely being added together can be seen in the shifting…