This study was conducted to assess the effects of two kindergarten programs--AK and NK (a regular curriculum with and without an adaptation from the language-experience approach to reading), social class, and sex upon children's oral syntactic language facility after a five-month period. Eighty subjects were distributed among eight classrooms and…

Spontaneous full passives and related constructions from 234 children aged 2;0 to 13;11 and elicited passives from 262 college students were analyzed. Full passives were classified as reversible (The dog was chased by the girl), instrumental non-reversible (The lamp was broken by [or with] the ball), or agentive non-reversible (The lamp was broken…

Recording, narrative, exposition, and argument were hypothesized to present writing tasks of increasing cognitive and verbal complexity. This was investigated by obtaining writing samples in each mode from a stratified sample of 128 Australian sixteen year olds. The cognitive-complexity hypothesis was supported by data concerning the relative…

Examines the nature of thematization and thematic progression in children's narrative styles, in order to draw some conclusions regarding the acquisition of textual skills. (AM)

A comparison of the linguistic development of the young child and the language of advertising. It is noted that relative structural identity exists between certain advertisements and certain linguistic productions of the child because of the similarity of conditions in which the linguistic tool is used. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

A discussion of syntax and different kinds of expression based on discourse analysis of children aged ten to twelve. The extent to which linguistic structures and syntax are determined by the type of language usage and expression is studied. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

A discussion of the child's language acquisition including examples of syntactic development. This analysis is introduced by references to various language theories, particularly the generative and psycholinguistic theories, and to various systems of syntactic description. The examples given raise questions on the theoretic and ideological levels.…

A computer program for measuring the complexity of syntactic structures in different levels of graded reading materials and in children's oral and written language is presented. (RW)

Discusses H. Zobl's paper, "Configurationality and the Subset Principle: The Acquisition of V' by Japanese Learners of English," and asserts that the subset principle, with certain adaptations, can apply to second language learning. In the context of Universal Grammar theory, first and second language acquisition are clearly different.…

The article surveys literature and research about deaf children's acquisition of American Sign Language, especially as it compares to language acquisition of their hearing peers. The development of manual articulation as well as vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and fingerspelling acquisition are discussed. (JL)

Crib-talk between identical twin girls and diary records of their speech were examined. It was found that the subjects developed conventional syntax and vocabulary but adapted them in ways which appropriately expressed their twin status. (Author/SED)

Three- and four-year-old children were asked to perform a judgement task in which they chose between incorrect English transitives and intransitives and their correct adult equivalents. Purely semantic or syntactic models fail to explain the findings as well as does a model based on semantic/syntactic transitivity. (SED)

Assesses the interrelations among the functional properties of maternal speech, the structural properties of maternal speech, and child language growth for a period of six months for 22 two-year-old children and their mothers. (HOD)

Discusses the current approaches to interlanguage syntax, focusing on the goal of finding consistency and pattern in syntactic variation. Some themes contributing to descriptive approaches include: the transition from morphosyntax acquisition studies to those of more complex syntax, the emergence of syntax from discourse, explicitness, and the…

Recent attempts to classify the meanings of two-word utterances expressed by young children have assumed that children always intend one of the meanings adults might express. This paper challenges that assumption and suggests an alternative approach to determining the meaning of these utterances. (Author/RM)