This study examined the factors influencing the choice of the conjunctions "and" or "but" in joining two clauses of a compound sentence. Subjects were students at first-, fourth-, seventh-, and tenth-grade and adult levels. (Author/ED)

The arguments for and against viewing the child's initial one-word utterances as holophrases are reviewed. An alternative view of early language development, which takes the speech act as the basic unit of linguistic communication, rather than the sentence, is offered as a solution to the holophrase controversy. (Author/RM)

The influence of five programs of the Mt. Druitt Early Childhood Project on the development of preschool children's vocabulary and syntactical skills was assessed in a pretest/posttest design. Programs differed in the amount of structure they imposed on the language experiences of the children and in the content they specified. Different measures…

AN INSTRUMENT FOR MEASURING LANGUAGE MATURITY SHOULD BE EASILY ADMINISTRABLE AND SCOREABLE AND SHOULD BE BASED ON VALID INDICES OF LANGUAGE MATURITY. A RECENT STUDY BY KELLOG W. HUNT SUGGESTED THAT THESE INDICES BE BASED ON A NEW SYNTACTIC UNIT, THE T-UNIT, CONSISTING OF 1 MAIN CLAUSE TOGETHER WITH ANY CLAUSES SUBORDINATED TO IT. COORDINATED MAIN…

This volume discusses some of the language-related factors involved in bilingual education. The first paper surveys the major results and current research topics in the field of syntax, with an emphasis on how they might be of relevance to bilingual education. The first part of the article gives an overview on the nature of the field of syntax,…

Two English-speaking six-year-olds attending a French-speaking kindergarten in Montreal were tested for the content of their French L2 (second language) utterances. An adaptation of the mean length of utterance (MLU) index was used to judge the order of acquisition in the encoding of semantic-syntactic relations in the second language. The same…

A study was undertaken to determine how much knowledge children have of grammatical systems before they evidence the systems in their spontaneous speech in a productive way. A child aged about two and a half years was examined over several months through elicited imitation causing him to repeat a model sentence immediately after the researcher.…

This paper reports on a study conducted to determine the abilities of children to make optional transformations in sentences conjoined with "and." The subjects were 35 middle-class children between the ages of five and eight, who demonstrated average school achievement, spoke standard American English, and had normal speech and hearing. A…

Language samples of 15 young normal children actively engaged in learning base syntax were compared with samples of 15 linguistically deviant children of a comparable linguistic level. Mean number of morphemes per utterance was used to determine linguistic level. The two groups were matched according to five linguistic levels previously…

This book focuses on the nature and development of knowledge concerning grammar and the meanings coded by grammar. This knowledge is inferred from performance, from sentences and the settings in which they are spoken, and from signs of comprehension or incomprehension of sentences by preschool children. The first two stages of linguistic…

This study assessed the effectiveness of five hours of distributed training on three-year-old children's comprehension and production of the passive, negative, possessive and negative passive syntactic structures. A comprehension test identified 20 children who did not evidence understanding of these structures. Subject were randomly assigned to…

The study examined the influence of the semantic variable of contrastive gender of the pronoun, and the phonological variable of contrastive stress of the pronoun, on four- to eight-year-old children's comprehension of syntactic structures containing the nonidentity pronominal reference. Four types of items were generated: those containing…

Investigated the written syntactic maturity of students from grade ten through sixth year university. (DD)

This article describes a series of experiments concerning the relationship between cognitive processes and learning a second language. Similarities and differences between first language acquisition and second language learning by children and adults are discussed. (CFM)

Describes a part of a study on children's acquisition of Warlpiri, an aboriginal language spoken in central Australia, which aimed to find out at what age the children respond consistently to particular word orders and case frames for simple transitive sentences. Makes comparisons with the acquisition of Turkish transitive clauses. (SED)