A study examined the type of Wh question (those introduced by who, what, when, where, why, or how) and the phrase structure rules required for the verb phrase to determine how they relate to the acquisition and development of the Wh question transformation. Children ranging in age from 2 to 6 years were given three tasks, each containing 36…

A telephone conversation was transcribed and marked for stress. A portion of the transcription, not marked for stress, was given to native English speakers who were asked to underline the word(s) in each sentence or phrase that should receive the most prominent stress. The overlap of actual stress and the assignments of the participants who were…

This study lends support to the modes of speech continuum and points to a relationship between linguistic and communicative competence. Results indicated that communicative competence of preschoolers increased with age and suggested a hierarchy from context-centered through topic-centered probes. Correlations with linguistic competence indicated…

Finds that reading-disabled fifth-grade children were inferior to control groups in their ability to assign words to semantic categories, identify first phonemes in spoken words, and judge morphologic relationships between word pairs. Concludes that the developmental reading-disabilities syndrome includes a deficit in linguistic skills necessary…

This book concludes a six-volume review of research and theory on learning and cognition. Its six chapters cover the following topics: theories of semantic memory, comprehension and memory of text, coding processes in memory, perceptual learning from reading, speech perception, and the organization and core concepts of learning theory and…

The two primary purposes of this book are to extend information about children's language learning and to look at existing notions of how children acquire language by considering what is meant by linguistic competence. The introductory chapter presents an account of two approaches to the study of language acquisition and outlines the author's…

Concludes that both average and superior students know their language, standard English predominated in the speech of all subgroups, and teachers should not have different expectations for males than they do for females. (RB)

This paper concerns the question of linguistic deficiency in the bilingual setting. The author believes that language is a uniquely human phenomenon developing mainly in response to maturation in the midst of confusing linguistic input, varying in style and language according to situation. However, there seems to be no reason to expect the…

Departing from Baconian science which focuses on explanation of the occurrence of events, Chomsky's linguistics involves a different orientation--namely the explanation of form to account for linguistic behavior. The "knowledge" upon which linguistic judgements are based involves the premise of innate mechanisms. The assumption that speakers and…

This paper attempts to integrate the results of the ethnographic and attitudinal components of a broader study into a specifically sociolinguistic analysis. While a variety of opinions can be found in the literature on code-switching, the contention here is that code-switching is a norm in specific speech situations that exist in stable bilingual…

This book describes how the child acquires a linguistic system before he is capable of verbal utterances or has developed the ability to structure language in a meaningful way. The first chapter of the book contains a discussion of previous language development studies on learning the mother tongue and proposes a hypothesis of language development…

This study examined the development of causal expressions in children's discourse from two to three years of age. Linguistic, contextual, and pragmatic influences on language development were the major factors considered. (CM)