Two claims about early stages of language development--that of a limitation on length of utterance and that of reduction rules which delete major constituents from simple sentences--are questioned. Supporting arguments are reviewed, and alternative explanations offered. (RM)

Results of tests comparing the ability of children and adults to understand and produce sentences according to type (active, question, passive, negative) and complexity (simple, center-embedding, double-embedding). (Author/FWB)

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

In a previous paper, J. Hurford accounts for errors in children's question forms by postulating that children incorrectly internalize adult rules. This article suggests that this rule is inconsistent and unjestified, and that such errors are due to segmentation problems and processing limitations. (CHK)

This article criticizes a previous paper that stressed a transformational analysis of children's question acquisition. It is argued that a surface structure generalization analysis makes empirically correct predictions about mistakes both in acquisition of inverted word order and in the form of "wh" questions. (CHK)

This paper reports on a study conducted to determine the abilities of children to make optional transformations in sentences conjoined with "and." The subjects were 35 middle-class children between the ages of five and eight, who demonstrated average school achievement, spoke standard American English, and had normal speech and hearing. A…

This paper, based on Rosenbaum's (1967) grammar of adult English, attempts to apply ideas of deep structure and transformations to child grammar. The main rules predicated include phrase structure rules, segment structure rules, contextual features, and transformational rules. In this approach, the role of transformations is to segment and place…

This investigation was intended to study the effects of some linguistic variables on child and adult memories for sentences when recall was prompted by nouns embedded in the sentences. Its purpose was to examine for developmental differences in sentence processing systems expected by psycholinguistic theory and research. A group of 64 subjects,…

Article deals with the Osgood model of sign learning...and the Chomskian approach. Both...approaches are discussed in terms of their appropriateness with respect to teachers' questions about language development and language stimulation. (Author)

Two questions, what is a contrastive grammar, and what is comparable across linguistic systems, are touched on. The problem of the exact relationship of contrastive linguistics to linguistic theory is addressed. Two perhaps mutually exclusive views are discussed. See FL 508 197 for availability. (Author/RM)

A study was undertaken to see whether developmental patterns of language acquisition could be discovered in children beyond age five. Specifically, the study attempted to uncover a pattern in the development of the skill of stress interpretation, or the understanding of the effect of emphasis of a particular word on the deep structure of the…

Data on the complexity of relative clause formation in children indicate that right embedding precedes central embedding in development. Previous research on the subject argues that configurations where coreferential NP's function as subjects are less complex than configurations where coreferential NP's function as objects. It appears that the…

This study begins with a discussion of what a phonological rule is, and how the term has been used in previous investigations. The relation between the child's phonological system and the adult's system, the relationship between discrimination and production, and the viability of positing underlying forms for children's words are also discussed.…

The distinction between deep and surface levels of language; the intersection of learning theory and cognitive development; and the linguistic competence of the pre-literate child and the illiterate adult are highlighted. Author argues that T-G Grammar will be a powerful aid to recognizing and dealing with problems of mass literacy education.…

Comprehension of the quantifiers "some" and "all" was studied with 202 children, three to nine years old. Thirty-two quantifier sentences dealing with descriptions of circles and squares were presented to the children. Wooden objects were presented to some children to see if results were affected by the choice of abstract objects, but no…