This article investigates the acquisition of different types of clefts and of "be"-fragments in European Portuguese. We first present the main syntactic and discourse properties of different cleft structures and of "be"-fragments in European Portuguese, and we discuss how data from first language acquisition may contribute to…

Suggests that the evolutionary process in each child's acquisition of language is a mirror image of the historical evolution of the language. (TO)

Analysis showed that the majority of subjects applied a coherent strategy to three-word utterances presented in different word orders, and confirmed the existence of two primitive strategies. (Authors/CB)

This article focuses on the meaning of nonfinite clauses ("root infinitives") in Dutch and English child language. I present experimental and naturalistic data confirming the claim that Dutch root infinitives are more often modal than English root infinitives. This cross-linguistic difference is significantly smaller than previously assumed,…

This paper reviews current literature concerning the development of children's comprehension of the processes of natural languages and it recommends a new study approach designed to evaluate the joint effects of lexical and syntactic devices on comprehension. It discusses three main kinds of investigations--studies of the comprehension of…

Analysis of the communicative skills of a nine-year-old deaf boy with minimal schooling showed pantomiming and gestures to be his major mode of communication. Certain semantic patterns prevailed. Use of left or right hand also had semantic correlates. Formal and idiosynacratic signs were discovered in the boy's vocabulary. (Author/PJM)

Background: The computational grammatical complexity (CGC) hypothesis claims that children with G(rammatical)-specific language impairment (SLI) have a domain-specific deficit in the computational system affecting syntactic dependencies involving 'movement'. One type of such syntactic dependencies is filler-gap dependencies. In contrast, the…

A discussion of English native-language vocabulary acquisition in children takes a closer look at the assumption that vocabulary is learned by common association of word with event, focusing on the acquisition of verb meanings. The intuitive power of the view that words are learned by noticing real-world contingencies for their use is…

These reports deal with language as a whole: its nature, its history, its relationship to culture, its acquisition, the immediate uses to which it can be put, and the development in students of an appreciation for the ability to use a foreign language. The book is divided into three main sections: Acquisition, Application, and Appreciation. For…

Concludes that it is time for teachers to be more critical of the commercial materials and classroom practices commonly used to sensitize children to different semantic cues and morphological units. Argues that without a firm knowledge of context clues and morphemes on the part of teachers, the teaching of these skills will remain incidental. (FL)

Analysis of the babbling of five infants indicated that between 14 and 40 percent of utterances recurred in particular contexts with a greater than expected frequency, suggesting that babbling is not entirely random but contains consistent sound-meaning relationships that are not adult-modeled. (Author/CB)

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that children's use of Japanese case particles obeys the grammatical principles introduced at the earlier stage of language development. In previous studies concerning the acquisition of Japanese case examined through the experimental method, it has been suggested that children acquire the functional use…

Dutch native children and Turkish immigrant children, born and reared in the Netherlands, were asked to tell a story from a series of pictures, at age six and again at age eight. The Turkish children exhibited about the same level of narrative proficiency in Dutch as their Dutch peers. (Author/LMO)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 30 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) conditional constructions in modern English; (2) phonological and phonetic effects of nasalization on vowel height; (3) neural coding of pitch; (4) the…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 32 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the development of young children's metalinguistic understanding of "letter,""word," and "sentence"; (2) modifications in speech to elderly conversationalists;…