The theme of this volume, complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) as dimensions of second language production, proficiency and development, represents a thriving area of research that addresses two general questions that are at the heart of many studies in second language acquisition and applied linguistics: What makes a second language (L2)…

It has usually been psycholinguistics which has accommodated itself to alterations within linguistic formulations, but now there is a growing independence on the part of many psychologists in the study of language. The shift in emphasis is from competence to performance. (POP)

A group of three-year-old children was compared to one of four-year-old children in the usage of 26 syntactic transformations on the basis of 60 utterances per child. The older group used significantly more sentence transformations per child and significantly fewer simple active declarative sentences than the younger. Among the older group 10 out…

In response to earlier studies by Thompson and Chapman (1977) and Clark and Clark (1977), 16 middle-class and upper-class White children between 1.2 and 2.2 were tested for overextension in production and comprehension. (AM)

A data-based study done in Philadelphia examined the constraints on relative pronoun deletion and looked for a possible correlation to social stratification or stylistic variation. Restrictive relative clauses only are examined. Constraints appear to be due to performance factors related to sentence processing. (SCC)

Ninety children between the ages of three and six described objects which differed on three simultaneous dimensions, using adjective combinations appropriate to the dimensions. Each child performed an imitation, comprehension, and production task. (Author/CFM)

Some of the major studies by the proponents of the Derivational Theory of Complexity are reviewed in this paper, and the results of a study to determine the adequacy of the theory as an account of message processing difficulty are included. The subjects for the study were students selected from five sections of the introductory communication class…

This article concludes that language mixes do not constitute a major interference in the acquisition of bilingualism since children appear to be able to differentiate their two linguistic systems from an early age. (Author/NCR)

Four papers are included in this document concerning the structure of linguistic input to children. Dan Slobin's paper, "Questions of Language Development in Cross-Cultural Perspective," suggests that children everywhere acquire basic grammatical competence in the first five or six years of life, regardless of social milieu or linguistic…

Question-answer interactions were chosen as an effective means of investigating the effect of the linguistic environment on language development. Research was reviewed indicating that the improvement in question and answer performance of a maturing child is based on the advancement of both his linguistic and cognitive abilities and that the adult…

Examines the role of "routines" and grammatical patterns in first and second language acquisition by children and adults, specifically with regard to syntactic structures. (Author/AM)

This paper gives the results of a controlled experiment on word association. The purpose was to establish norms of commonality of primary descriptive adjective responses to common nouns. The stimuli consisted of 203 common nouns selected from 10 everyday topics of conversation, approximately 20 from each topic. There were 350 subjects, 50% male,…

Investigators agree that mothers employ a variety of request forms and that children seem to be able to respond to these forms with a remarkable degree of accuracy. It is suggested that the speech of mothers to their children is filled with requests which are really not requests at all. It is shown that many of what appear to be adult requests to…

The objectives of this study were to examine a body of data collected by five graduate students at the University of Texas at San Antonio and to determine, after a careful analysis of the transcribed utterances, whether all instances of language alternations can be truly considered code-switching strategies and whether those that can be so…

Children in school cooperate in the evaluation of their products and activities by teachers and other students by calling attention to these products and activities with various language strategies. The requests that someone notice something and/or praise it are the data base for this study. The unmarked speech act for this request type is in the…