A study examined 12 preschool children's early use of "who,""what," and "which" questions in spontaneous speech. Results indicated that children began to ask object questions before they asked subject questions, and acquired argument questions before adjunct questions. It was suggested that the two results could…

The viewpoint is advanced that induction is a determing factor in the way knowledge is acquired and that in the acquisition of a language and the development of knowledge this process plays a crucial role. (JD)

Longitudinal studies of the application of a paraphrasing model to 18- to 28-month-olds indicated that mean length of utterance was significantly correlated with realized and paraphrased frequencies of several linguistic items in the subjects' corpora. The model was productive for examining children's corpora of speech and the linguistic…

The antecedents of verbal behavior, together with the teaching skills of the adult linguistic community, probably constitute all the necessary bases for language acquisition. As they seemed to be sufficient for the explanation of all the known phenomena, an assumption of an innate linguistic language acquisition device was rejected as superfluous.…

To understand the development of number-word construction, students in grades 1, 3, 5, and 7 named and counted from a set of numbers into the billions in two studies. Findings are discussed both in relation to children's growing knowledge of the number system and to vocabulary development. (Author)

The effect of grammatical phonological rules (those in English) and nongrammatical (those in other languages) on the learning and reproduction of morpheme-length utterances and the role of maturation on this effect were examined. Children preschool through second grade were the subjects. There were no significant differences at any grade level…

Discusses the inadequacies of the linguistic development theory called cognitive determinism and suggests instead the linguistic input hypothesis. Concludes that it is not either cognitive development or linguistic input that determines linguistic growth, but an interaction between them. (RM)

The purpose of the study was to determine whether by structuring and sequencing the same monosyllabic CVC, CVVC, and CVCe English words in two different patterns (EI and EII), administered with the same controlled procedures, boys and girls in grade one would be facilitated in detecting, identifying, and discriminating among single vowels and…

A study is described which examined the retrieval of regular and irregular past tense verbs. Results suggested that preterites such as "taught" are not stored as separate and independent lexical units but are formed from the verb stem by means of derivational rules. (Author/RM)

The hypothesis explains the early lexical development of children and the predictions of this hypothesis are shown to be consistent with available data on overextension. (Author/NCR)

A study examined how preschool children use information about linguistic contrast in learning new words. The 72 subjects were assigned to four groups to play a game. They were asked to get an unfamiliar item, one of nine swatches of different colors, shapes, and materials. In the first group, the children were told only one label (color, shape, or…

Preschoolers' ability to utilize language in spatial problem solving was tested with 64 predominately middle-class children. The number of correct responses was analyzed using an age/sex/medium analysis of variance. It was found that the verbal response mode leads to substantially more correct responses than do pictures and that girls performed…

The learning and retention performances of children and adults were compared on free and serialized reproductions of meaningful words. Although the children took longer than the adults to reach the learning criterion, and short-term retention was equivalent for both groups, the children displayed a superior serial recall at 7-day retention.…

Examination of the speech of eight mothers and eight fathers to their one- to two-year-olds (N=8) indicated that, while paternal speech was not more diverse than maternal speech, paternal speech did show greater use of rare vocabulary and lower use of common vocabulary. (Author/CB)