Reports on a study to determine the origin, development, and use of the comparative in children ages 2-7. The role of adult-child interaction in acquisition is discussed. Tabulated results show that the comparative is used infrequently by young children. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Criticism of much of the previous research into the syntax of children's language. (RD)

To determine the normal sequence of the development of Spanish phonology and Spanish grammatical patterns in the speech of native Spanish speakers, ages 2-5, a study of the acquisition of interrogative formation was undertaken. Two male and two females from each of nine age intervals between two and five were selected as informants; all were…

Comprehension of the quantifiers "some" and "all" was studied with 202 children, three to nine years old. Thirty-two quantifier sentences dealing with descriptions of circles and squares were presented to the children. Wooden objects were presented to some children to see if results were affected by the choice of abstract objects, but no…

Comprehension of reversible active and passive sentences was studied with 48 Japanese children between the ages of two and six. Four types of sentences were constructed using passive and active structures and two word orders: subject-object-verb (SOV) and object-subject-verb (OSV). The basic order of elements in a simple sentence in Japanese is…

By age two, a child begins to form complex sentences by joining two or more sentences or by embedding one sentence into another. Formation of conjoined structures is a simpler process and emerges earlier than that of embedding structures. This paper attempts to answer the following questions: (1) Do children produce or understand embedding…

The acquisition of rules for formulating causative verbs was studied with children over a period of a few years. Most of the data is based on the spontaneous speech of the author's two daughters, from age 2;6 to 6;2 and from age 2;4 to 3;11. It was hypothesized that there are at least two prerequisites for the child's formulation of a general rule…

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)

A study was conducted to compare the relative performance on yes-no questions of bilingual and monolingual children and to discuss the relationship of semantic development and linguistic development, both in the bilinguals and monolinguals. Eighteen English monolingual, eighteen Japanese monolingual, and eighteen Japanese-English bilingual…

This is a longitudinal study of a child's acquisition of Mandarin phonology between the ages of 1;2 and 2;8. During this period, the child was much less verbal than many children reported in other child phonology studies. The study consists of two parts. The first part is a description of the child's "proto-language," in which he used…

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 purpose of this study is to compare the English syntactic structures produced in spontaneous oral language and the receptive English syntactic and vocabulary skills of bilingual Spanish and Indian children and monolingual Anglo-Americans, all of whom qualify for Title I elementary schools (Grades 1-6). People in Action, the Northwestern Syntax…

Research was conducted to study systematically the comprehension and production of the pronouns "he, she, him, her" in the language of normal and linguistically deviant children. The purposes of the study were to: observe the manner in which normal children comprehend and produce these four pronouns, in terms of both their use and their…

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…

This paper proposes a broad outline of a variable model of language development and explores several particulars of such a model in the language behavior of four two-year-old children. The process by which information about language is progressively transformed and integrated rather than merely being added together can be seen in the shifting…