It has been known for several decades that young children have difficulties with universal sentences. In this article, I present an analysis of the main errors that have been reported in the literature. My proposal is based on an old idea, namely, that children's errors are caused by a noncanonical mapping from syntactic form to semantic…

Background: Although a number of studies have been conducted on normal acquisition in French, systematic methods for analysis of French and normative group data have been lacking. Aims: To develop a systematic method for the analysis of language samples in Quebec French, and to provide preliminary normative data on early lexical and syntactic…

The ability to process the linguistic input in real time is crucial for successfully acquiring a language, and yet little is known about how language learners comprehend or produce language in real time. Against this background, we have conducted a detailed study of grammatical processing in language learners using experimental psycholinguistic…

Many studies have observed phonetic and phonological differences between function words and content words. However, as many of the most commonly cited function words are also very high in frequency, it is unclear whether these differences are the result of syntactic category or word frequency. This study attempts to determine whether syntactically…

This paper stresses the concept of deaf students as visual learners. Educators are urged to think visually in order to help maximize opportunities for deaf students to use their visual learning skills in developing literacy skills, and in their general academic, social, and personal development. Examples are offered of structural/grammatical…

Children, ages 5 to 8 years (n=71), were required to listen and detect errors out of a partly wrong sequence of tape-recorded French number words from 1 to 100. Children (from several schools near Montpellier, France) were from preschool, grade 1, and grade 2. Results show that wrong syntactic rules were better detected than omissions, whereas…

Research and theory on language acquisition and language socialization are examined and compared. The language acquisition perspective is that the central question is how children acquire forms and patterns of language, with syntax at the core, so early and so rapidly. From the viewpoint of language socialization, the issue is not only of…

A proposal that further generalizes a rule in Government and Binding theory (Chomsky, 1981) is examined for its implications for acquisition of verb movement. Mark Baker's proposal extends the Move-alpha rule to posit that the head of any phrase may be moved to become incorporated into the head of any phrase that properly governs the phrase where…

The paper describes methods of natural language enhancement which both teachers and parents can use with young children who have language delays. The importance of connecting language to meaningful, functional communication is stressed. The reinforcement for the child becomes the adult's natural and spontaneous response. Adults, then, must prove…

A study of the syntactic development of discourse in and after adolescence among fluent English speakers in a bilingual community of East Los Angeles focused on subordinate devices not observed until adolescence, such as the relative clause using "which" and clauses using "even though/although." Discourse analysis of these…

This paper examines aspects of variation in child language, and specifically how children express causal relations in complex sentences. Four particular types of variation were observed: (1) the order of clauses and the connectives used to link clauses; (2) mothers' causal statements; (3) interaction of language form and content, in the form of…

This study examined the relationships between cognitive development, language acquisition, and socioeconomic class, as manifested in children's written language. Four classes of sixth-grade students participated in the investigation, a control class and an experimental class from each of two socioeconomic environments (low and high). The treatment…

This study assessed the effect of six weeks of sentence-combining activities on the syntactic maturity of first-year university students. The Syntactic Maturity Test (SMT) and a free writing exercise were used as pre/post instruments to determine words-per-T-unit and words-per-clause ratios. Significant results favoring the experimental group were…

Recent work in syntactic theory has revealed that word order is more constrained in subordinate clauses, particularly nonasserted clauses, than in main clauses (Ross, 1973; Hooper & Thompson, 1973). On the other hand, main clauses are restricted in the extent to which they allow pronominalization and verb phrase deletion (Lakoff, 1968). These…