Preliminary version of this article presented at the meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development, Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 1971. Research and preparation of the paper supported in part by an Intramural Grant from the Regents of the University of California to T. Kenney. (VM)

Two major strategies for linguistically encoding an idea or proposition are suggested. The first strategy involves encoding an idea in the space of a single utterance, while the second strategy conveys the proposition through a sequence of two or more utterances. The tendency has been to focus on discourse as a composite of sentences (the first…

This paper discusses Lee and Canter's procedure for assessing child language development as an example of how psycholinguistics is beginning to enter the language clinic. The procedure includes recording and transcribing examples of children's sentences, then scoring them to yield a Developmental Sentence Score (DDS). This procedure was compared…

Explains the relationship between understanding a temporal or causal event and the ability to articulate and comprehend sentences about the event. The subjects of the research were 60 children from an Italian elementary school, 20 each from the first, third, and fifth grades. (CFM)

This investigation studied the performance of fifteen normal and fifteen language-disabled children on experimental pragmatic tasks and on a standardized Piagetian measure of sensorimotor intelligence. The children were matched for mean length of utterance, all subjects performing at the holophrastic level. A series of experimental measures was…

The present level of understanding of the psycholinguistic processes and capacities underlying the child's acquisition of language is reviewed in this publication. In the first chapter, linguistic theories, biological characteristics of language learning, and the distinctions between language competence and language performance are discussed. The…

Previous research has shown how macro-structures can affect children's verbalizations. This study focuses on whether conversational contexts of forms are learned along with syntax, on what makes syntax, and on how to predict speech. Transcripts of videotapes of young children provided a matrix of function or act against actual utterance, wherein…

The ability of children at different ages to distinguish instructions to "ask" from instructions to "tell" and the types of structures used to express these directives were studied. Subjects were 120 children, aged 2 years 6 months to 6 years 6 months. Children were instructed to either ask or tell an adult or another child to give them puzzle…

Children in school cooperate in the evaluation of their products and activities by teachers and other students by calling attention to these products and activities with various language strategies. The requests that someone notice something and/or praise it are the data base for this study. The unmarked speech act for this request type is in the…