The terms "interactional competence" and "learning" are discussed in the context of recent research in the areas of cognitive science and ethnomethodological conversation analysis studies of language learning. Two data excerpts from a longitudinal case study of a beginning learner of English are presented to illustrate (1) the…

Repetition is a central phenomenon of behavior, and researchers have made extensive use of it to illuminate psychological functioning. In the language sciences, a ubiquitous form of such repetition is "structural priming," a tendency to repeat or better process a current sentence because of its structural similarity to a previously experienced…

Developmental disorders might differ in their language profiles when using parent reports. The first study indicated that school aged children with ASD have similar language profiles as children with ADHD. Both groups had relatively more difficulties with pragmatics than with structural language aspects. The second study indicated that both…

Explores markedness of languages and language change in relation to their roles in the consistency of language. Concludes typology provides no explanations in itself, but rather through data which need explanations and form a testing ground for linguistic theories. (Author/BK)

Suggests that the evolutionary process in each child's acquisition of language is a mirror image of the historical evolution of the language. (TO)

Infants' ability to rapidly extract properties of language-like systems during brief laboratory exposures has been taken as evidence about the innate linguistic state of humans. However, previous studies have focused on structural properties that are not central to descriptions of natural language. In the current study, infants were exposed to 3-…

Noam Chomsky proposed that when children learn a language they do not learn to imitate given sentences; rather, they learn rules by which an infinite number of sentences can be produced and understood. This essay discusses the impact which this has had on the way educators view language and learning. (KC)

Theories about language functions, the ways in which language is used, are discussed. (Text is in French.) (PMP)

Discusses the evolution of the study of language to the science of linguistics structures. (BR)

The syntactic nonconversational features of monologue speech were analyzed in nine normal Ss (ages 2 and 3 years), three at each of R.Brown's three language developmental stages. (Author/PHR)

The five papers included in this book are all concerned with exploring a functional approach to language study. "Relevant Models of Language" suggests a functional interpretation of the child's early language development; "The Functional Basis of Language" related the child's language developmental functions to a functional…

This monograph presents a descriptive analysis of the syntactic patterns in 16 corpora of word combinations from 11 infants learning either English (six children), Samoan, Finnish, Hebrew, or Swedish. The mean utterance lengths range up to about 1.7 morpehmes. There are both reanalyses of corpora in the literature and new corpora. The data…

Preschool children were tested on their comprehension of the comparatives, "taller,""shorter,""more," and "less" in five types of sentences. Results suggest that many children can understand two-dimensional comparisons, but perform poorly on second-clause subjects pronoun sentences because of uncertainty about the referent of the pronoun. (SDH)

Although this edition of Wilhelm von Humboldt's "Linguistic Variability and Intellectual Development" is based entirely on the original German edition, the translators (George C. Buck and Frithjof A. Raven) and the publisher have attempted to clarify certain aspects of this work for the modern-day reader. These features include the addition of…