In a study of very young children's pronunciation of nouns and verbs, ten children aged 20 to 25 months were exposed to experimental nouns and verbs, which had not yet been comprehended or produced by the children. Each of the objects and actions was given an experimental name based on phonemes in the children's speech. These objects and actions…

Describes a study of young children's production of novel words serving as names of objects and actions, which were matched according to consonant and syllable structure. On each measure, accuarate production of new consonants was greater for the object words, possibly because action words have greater semantic complexity than object words. (SED)

Earlier version of this article was presented at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, December 28, 1968. (VM)

Describes the presence of a phonological selection strategy and consonant harmony rule in one child's developing phonological system. Evidence suggests that this constant harmony constraint operated across morpheme boundaries, causing a delay in the onset of two-word utterances and influencing the selection of words that could occur in word…

One of the most remarkable aspects of the babbling of some babies is that it is produced with intonation contours that sound very much like adult sentence melodies. This study reviews the literature and examines longitudinal data collected from seven children. Some of the non-adult-like syntactic uses made of intonation by children for…

The prerequisites of language acquisition are cognitive and pragmatic. The child's conceptual development and social needs direct his attention to particular linguistic forms. These provide an efficient selection device enabling the child to match his language learning task with his abilities. The second language learner who is cognitively and…

The relevance to elementary foreign language instruction of certain findings of child language development (native language) and the psychology of language acquisition is examined. A set of premises is proposed for a new scheme for the teaching of German based on these findings, namely, that comprehension precedes production, that language…

Essays on lexicon and vocabulary development, all in French, address these topics: bilingual lexicon in the context of translation; lexical and conceptual representation in bilinguals; pronouns in "existential" constructions in French and English; configurational functions within grammar; Gustaf Stern's diachronic semantic schema; the…