Teachers and parents intuitively judge the 'level' of the child and the 'level' of the text and try to match them; they know that overestimation or underestimation of either will be met with restlessness or boredom. In this way, they have an empirical understanding of Vygotsky's ZPD--the zone of proximal development he envisioned as measuring the…

Critical evaluation of Schlesinger's theory of language acquisition as expounded in Production of Utterances and Language Acquisition'' in The Ontogenesis of Grammar'', p63-101, New York: Academic Press, 1971. (RS)

Two tasks were used to test predictions of the Semantic Feature Hypothesis (SFH) about children's comprehension of the meaning of spatial adjectives. Predictions about acquisition order for dimensional features were supported; predictions about polarity were not. An acquisition hypothesis is offered that is contrary to the SFH. (Author/RM)

The antecedents of verbal behavior, together with the teaching skills of the adult linguistic community, probably constitute all the necessary bases for language acquisition. As they seemed to be sufficient for the explanation of all the known phenomena, an assumption of an innate linguistic language acquisition device was rejected as superfluous.…

Ludwig Wittgenstein's pragmatic conception of language, his theory on language learning, and his treatment of the function of language in the growth of the child are the focus of this book. Wiggenstein's study of language is compared with those made by linguists, psychologists, and sociologists, and accounts of language learning based on empirical…

Examines the hypotheses about how print represents the speech that preliterate children select when they receive input compatible with several such hypotheses. Results indicate that most preliterate children do not select phonologically based hypotheses, but instead focus on morphophonology and/or semantic aspects of words' referents. (40…

The attribution of function of various kinds to elements of child speech is discussed, and the question of the validity of the interpretations on which such attribution rests is explored with reference to Halliday's work on the development of meaning. (Author)

The purpose of this study was to determine what effect exposure to linguistic input pertinent to kinship terms and kinship relations has on the acquisition of the meaning of such terms. The subjects were 84 German children living in families, and 84 orphans. (Author/CFM)

The purpose of this study was to gather information on the acquisition of non-Indo-European languages. The field work was conducted in the village of Faleasao on the island of Ta'u in the Manu'a group of American Samoa from June, 1968 to June, 1969. The data collected consists primarily of tape recordings of naturally occurring and elicited speech…

The purpose of this study was to investigate children's acquisition of the non-comparative forms of spatial adjectives and to specifically test the following experimental questions: (1) Are positive-pole terms, or those such as "big," which indicate extent along a dimension, acquired earlier than negative-pole terms? (2) Does…

The present study is an attempt to apply a paradigm to the shift of verbal behavior before and after the age of seven in order to see if linguistic contexts affect verbal behavior differentially before seven or after seven. (Author/CFM)

Critically examines papers by Wellman and Estes, Olson and Torrance, and Hall and Nagy. (AEW)

A study examining the initial stages in the acquisition of the conditional system is reported. The objective was to discover how morphological productivity is related to the child's comprehension of the semantics of individual conditional types. Schachter's model of reality and unreality conditionals was used as a framework. Eight middle class,…