Reply to a paper entitled "Implications of Recent Psycholinguistic Developments for the Teaching of a Second Language, by Leon A. Jakobovits, which appeared in "Language Learning, volume 18, number 1 and 2, June 1968. (DS)

It is possible to examine the development of English wh-questions in first and second language learners and to detect regularities in the order of emergence of certain linguistic structures. It is also possible to speculate whether the stages in language acquisition correspond to the transformational derivation in transformational grammar. The…

An introductory statement notes the increased interest in the fields of communication theory, linguistics, and psycholinguistics during the period 1953-57 and suggests reasons for this attention. The body of the article summarizes and comments upon some of the relevant literature published since 1953 in these three interrelated areas, limiting the…