The purpose of this newsletter is to report current activities concerning the study of child language. Each issue will offer reports of ongoing research, announcements of upcoming meetings and conferences and reports on those recently held, and news of recent publications concerning language acquisition. This issue's research report is "Child…

In a study of adults' attitudes toward children with limited linguistic competence, four groups of judges listened to audiotaped samples of preschool children's speech and responded to questionnaire items addressing child attributes (e.g., intelligence, social maturity). Systemic biases were revealed toward children with limited communication…

Experiments in eliciting true/false judgments from young children aged 3-5 used a "talking doll," a toy panda with a speaker installed. The procedure has been used in studies of language comprehension, communication skills, and free conversation experiments. (CHK)

The analysis of videotaped, naturally occurring, adult-child interaction led to the isolation of the clarification request as a consistent feature of adult interactive styles. The importance of these demands, their nature, how adults deal with them, and their effects on children's communicative development are discussed. (CHK)

Investigates young children's ability to adjust the content of their verbal responses according to what they know their listener knows. Younger and older three-year-old children were able to discern what another person knew and did not know and adjusted their responses accordingly. Younger three-year-olds tended to be underinformative. (SED)

Asserting that language enrichment programs are often weakened by the assumption that standard English is necessary for the development of abstract thought, the author discusses problems of educational planning and policy with regard to low-income youth and specifies four areas in which further research must be carried out. (FWB)

Examines a multicontextual aspect of language proficiency that sociolinguists refer to as "communicative competence." Offers a procedure for its application. (PD)

Language is conceptualized as a multi-dimensional entity involving symbolic and cognitive aspects, communicative aspects, and structural-linguistic aspects. Analysis of single-word production of three children revealed developmental changes in the salience of these aspects and differences in functional styles of language acquisition. (CHK)

The ability of young children to communicate at the time they produce their first words was studied, with particular reference to the question of whether children are able to modify their requests depending on the adult's response. The subjects were four children ranging in age from 15 to 18 months; the data were their requests of adults coded…

The language a child learns from and attends to is the speech of significant persons in his world, addressed to each other and to him. As the child gradually participates in this social interaction he learns communicative competence, i.e., the nonconscious, tacit knowledge that underlies speech behavior--knowledge of both the language and the…

This bibliography, which emphasizes material published between 1957 and 1972, is centered on studies about the normal child's acquisition and development of his first language. Material dealing with handicaps, deviant language development, and second language learning is not included unless it is significantly related to studies of the normal…

The question is addressed whether a child would develop a communication system if a conventional linguistic model is absent. Six congenitally deaf children, who were not exposed to Sign Language, were observed and videotaped at play in their homes at intervals of one to three months. The children ranged in age from 1 year, 5 months to 4 years, 1…

A study was conducted of the capacity of sixth-grade children to communicate accurately paralinguistic affect. A dependent measure indicating the accuracy of paralinguistic communication of affect was obtained by comparing the level of affect which children intended to encode with ratings of vocal inflections from adult judges. Four independent…

This paper explores the relation between the communicative and categorical functions of language and the acquisition of language production. Three major factors in language acquisition are communication, ability for representation and the process of categorization. This paper offers evidence that a sudden and dramatic increase in lexical skill…