Five experiments are carried out to determine the comprehension of passives by children. Results obtained demonstrate that comprehension rests on knowledge of syntactic structure. V - NP were interpreted as verb-object. Passives lacking a preposition were interpreted as actives. Competence in passives may be at a high level before performance is…

Recognizing that school personnel serving limited English proficient students would benefit from objective and valid measures of language assessment, a study viewed the oral language performance of second language learners of English between the ages of six and eight in order to chart the development of selected syntactic structures in their…

The complexity of language of four, five, and six year old children was examined in a psycholinguistic study that attempted to differentiate the characteristics of sentences that were difficult for children to comprehend from those which were easy, and to discover whether children used a subject-verb-object (S-V-O) language strategy to interpret…

Intended as an introduction to psycholinguistics from the linguist's point of view, this book addresses itself to three main topics: the innateness of language, the relationship of linguistic knowledge to language usage, and the comprehension and production of speech. In 12 chapters, the book discusses the nature of language development, the…

The interview techniques developed by Carol Chomsky were used in a comparative study of the language acquisition of 32 bilingual and monolingual third grade students. After these students were matched for age, socioeconomic status, IQ, family environment (both parents in the home), and reading ability, they were placed in four…

A mother's interactions with her young daughter were studied with special emphasis placed upon the frequencies of linguistically instructional input and the strategies employed to provide this information. The girl was between 18 and 28 months old and her mean length of utterance (MIU) was between 1.5 and 4.3 morphemes. Only maternal input was…

Students' abilities in manipulation and control of syntax may be increased through a sequence of instruction involving the use of exercises termed "Non-Sentence Practice,""Nonsense-Sentences Practice," and "Syntactic Patterning Practice." The final step in the instruction sequence is to make the syntactic exercises pertinent to students' writing…

Three papers from this issue of the Working Papers are provided here. "The Nesting Constraint in Child Language," by Patrick Alan Brogan, discusses a child's ability to perform complex, internally embedded sentences. It is hypothesized that difficulty stems from a child's limited short-term memory. "A Framework for Studying Kin Term…

Data on the complexity of relative clause formation in children indicate that right embedding precedes central embedding in development. Previous research on the subject argues that configurations where coreferential NP's function as subjects are less complex than configurations where coreferential NP's function as objects. It appears that the…

American Sign Language (ASL) is historically related to French Sign Language (FSL) of the early 19th century. A study underway at Gallaudet College is researching the historical development of both languages treating syntax, lexicon and formation. This paper deals with data in the form of still photos collected in France and published in a…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of varying the semantic content of active and passive sentences along a dimension of "personalness" on the comprehension of those sentences by preschool age children. The study focuses on a current linguistic controversy dealing with the relative adequacy of syntax-based and…

In the first part of the paper the idea of the cognitive network is developed. The network consists of concepts linked together by relationships which are themselves concepts. Concepts are learned according to simple rules, and the network grows as new concepts are learned. Part II considers the growth and structure of language. The growth of…

The technique to be described here was developed to meet the need for a language production measure. It samples a variety of morphemic and syntactic patterns, and avoids the problems of imitation and of free speech analysis. The production test is administered in a sentence-completion format. A very brief incomplete story is told by the examiner…

Research is being conducted to determine the factors behind linguistic retardation in children. A first question raised was whether the linguistic system of the deviant child is qualitatively different from that of a normal child. A matching-up of deviant and normal children according to linguistic level suggests that the onset of base syntax may…

The first section of this paper discusses recent writing research and the basic elements of language development. The second section describes a program which used a sentence-combining method as an activity-based experience for language development. A six-month study involved all fourth graders at Powell School in Mountain View, California. The…