This dissertation studies the acquisition of verb argument structure in the basilectal subvariety of Jakarta Indonesian (henceforth, bJI). There are two characteristics of bJI that potentially affect the acquisition of verb argument structure. First, bJI sentences can surface not only in the full frame but also in truncated frames. Second, the…

This paper provides a brief but broad review of studies in semantics. Particular attention is given to I.A. Richards' analyses of utterances, to value statements which express moral or ethical judgments, and to recent efforts to formulate a logic of contextual implication. J.L. Austin's analysis of performative, or illocutionary, utterances and…

The first "missing link is that between the linguist's rules and the rule component of performance; the second is between a student's competence as expressed in correct performance in the controlled language learning situation and spontaneous performance where selection of language is involved. (Author/FWB)

The arguments for and against viewing the child's initial one-word utterances as holophrases are reviewed. An alternative view of early language development, which takes the speech act as the basic unit of linguistic communication, rather than the sentence, is offered as a solution to the holophrase controversy. (Author/RM)

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…

Problems related to the structure of the mental lexicon are considered. The single access assumption, the passive memory assumption, and the heterogeneous memory assumption are rejected in favor of the theory which assumes several active memories, each able to store expression based on only one homogenous set of abstract primitives. One lexicon…

Speech performance data, including hesitations in the stream of speech, fragmented words or phrases, retracings, and the use of intonation contours for noncommunicative purposes, are examined. It is proposed that these types of speech phenomena are indicative of underlying hypothesis testing and utterance planning strategies. Data produced by 48…

Children's early utterances were studied to determine whether there are developmental changes in the content, context, frequency, and form of their speech and the degree to which the changes correspond to changes in Piagetian cognitive stage. Twenty children were studied; six were 10 or 11 months old, and the remaining 14 were distributed evenly…

The purpose of this study was to determine statistically significant linguistic features of oral and written discourse rated quite high or low by teachers, and to make recommendations based on these findings to supplement existing guidelines for teaching composition. Fifty-five paired oral (tape-recorded) and written compositions were elicited…

This monograph represents the results of an attempt to construct at least one portion of a theoretical framework for describing and analyzing the performance routines used by the native actor to realize his competence to make culturally appropriate decisions. In general the concern is to describe in theoretical terms the structure and operation of…

The chapters in this volume represent a type of current psycholinguistic research that focuses both on the nature of human information processing and the coding of linguistic structure. The chapters and authors are as follows: (1) "The Wherefores and Therefores of the Competence-Performance Distinction," by V. Valian; (2) "Levels of Processing and…

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…

A study was conducted to determine: (1) whether language-impaired children have deficient paraphrase capabilities; (2) whether these deficiencies are both qualitative and quantitative; and (3) whether these abnormal skills are deterimental to normal linguistic growth. Forty-eight children from grades 1,3,5, and 7, with language impairments for…