In the UK there is much concern about the educational progress of children from areas of significant social disadvantage entering primary school with impoverished language skills. These children are not routinely referred to speech and language therapy services and therefore education practitioners in schools deliver intervention to facilitate…

Flexibility and productivity are hallmarks of human language use. Competent speakers have the capacity to use the words they know to serve a variety of communicative functions, to refer to new and varied exemplars of the categories to which words refer, and in new and varied combinations with other words. When and how children achieve this…

According to Crain and Nakayama (1987), when forming complex yes/no questions, children do not make errors such as "Is the boy who smoking is crazy?" because they have innate knowledge of "structure dependence" and so will not move the auxiliary from the relative clause. However, simple recurrent networks are also able to avoid…

One hundred-twenty children (15 boys and 15 girls) ages 4-7 years, who exhibited normal language development, were tested using a story completion approach to study language development. (Author/MH)

A review of Language and Psychology: Historical Aspects of Psycholinguistics by Arthur L. Blumenthal. (DS)

Examined data for two Danish children to determine subject omission, verb usage, and sentence subjects. Found that children exhibit asymmetry in subject omission according to verb type as subjects are omitted from main verb utterances more frequently than from copula utterances. Concluded that treatment of child subject omission should involve…

Investigates the differences in syntactical structure of sentences written by school children of different ages and of different abilities within the same grade. Writing of certain adults is also studied. (MH)

A study by Brown and Fraser (1963) shows that children tend to use telegraphic speech, employing content and omitting function words. This limitation involves the grammatical or semantic complexity of the sentences. Braine (1963) attempted to formulate productive rules for the initial stages in the acquisition of syntax by identifying two classes…

A study examined lexical specificity, the occurrence of pragmatic information, and a syntactic aspect (presence or absence of inversion) of the acquisition of both indirect and direct wh-questions in children aged five through eight years. (MSE)

Subjects between 8 and 20 years of age were tested for competence on an exception to a grammatical rule, the minimal distance rule. (Authors)

Examines the reason why new grammar has failed to make the impact that was predicted fifteen or so years ago.(RB)

This study examined how school-aged children process different grammatical categories. Event-related brain potentials elicited by words in visually presented sentences were analyzed according to seven grammatical categories with naturally varying characteristics of linguistic functions, semantic features, and quantitative attributes of length and…

Applications of research in psycholinguistics, particularly Noam Chomsky's research, have suggested some drastic innovations in the practices of both the classroom teacher and the child development researcher. For example, more emphasis is needed upon asking what a speaker knows about the grammar of the language with less concern about how…

By the fifth grade no differences were found between the order of adjectives in a sentence preferred by children and by adults. (ED/JD)