Sessions of verbal interaction (N=22) significantly facilitated syntax acquisition by 32- to 40-month-olds. In response to children's sentences, experimenters replied with recast sentences that maintained the same meaning but provided new syntactic information. A selective bias in these replies was matched by selectively stronger facilitation in…

Research supported in part by a grant from the United States Public Health Service. (DD)

Reviews research dealing with language acquisition to show that there are developmental trends in the acquisition of syntax. (FL)

A procedure called "contrast training" is described as a method to overcome the generalization problem by contrasting sentences so that young language handicapped learners can learn to recognize which parts of a sentence occur regardless of the presence or absence of the target form. (Author/SW)

A comprehension task employing English animate third person pronouns was run on 100 children from three to seven years of age. Results show that comphrehension of forms beyond chance level first appears at age five, with continuing improvement through ages six and seven. Mastery of gender distinction preceded number and case. (Author/PJM)

The article examines normal language and communication development to provide insights into what parents of hearing impaired children can expect from and do for their children. Findings of particular importance for facilitating linguistic growth in hearing impaired children are discussed. (DLS)

Compares two language intervention methods on effectiveness at improving syntactic structures of language-delayed preschool children. The interactive approach optimized syntax improvement for children with high pretraining scores, whereas the programed approach resulted in superior syntax performance for low-scoring children. (Author/BK)

This study is an attempt to investigate the efficacy of using existing semantic relations categories for understanding how children comprehend the verb "with" + noun construction. (Author)

Reports on research into the early semantic-syntactic utterances of deaf children as compared to those of learning children. It is suggested that differences in acquisition patterns may be attributable to the pedagogical nature of deaf language acquisition. (Author/AM)

Reports on several syntactic studies and suggests that switches by mode in writing strategy may be developmentally beneficial. (DD)

Reports on a study that examined the effect of intended audience and mode of discourse on the syntactic complexity of compositions written by sixth- and tenth-graders, and that attempted to determine whether there were increases in syntactic complexity from grade 6 to grade 10 for each audience and in each mode. (DD)

This study demonstrates the influence of a visit to the United States on the communicative competence in English of a bilingual child who lives in Rome, Italy, with his American mother and Italian father. (CFM)

Examined parental speech data demonstrating that linguistic input to children does not contain sufficient information to support unaided learning of the pronoun "one." Examined 18-month-olds' interpretation of sentences with a "one" substitution. Found that 18-month-olds have command of the syntax of "one." Because…