Children (2;10 to 4;7 years) taught passive sentences with forms employing animate patients could produce and comprehend passives better than children taught with forms employing inanimate patients. This indicates that "perspective" is the cognitive counterpart to the formal category of subject and that language acquisition is connected…

The possible cognitive consequences of learning to read are explored. The conditions of learning, it is argued, combine with the degree of technical mastery to affect thinking powers and conceptions of language, learning, and authority. (Author/MT)

Sessions of verbal interaction (N=22) significantly facilitated syntax acquisition by 32- to 40-month-olds. In response to children's sentences, experimenters replied with recast sentences that maintained the same meaning but provided new syntactic information. A selective bias in these replies was matched by selectively stronger facilitation in…

Examines current spelling research from the perspective of one individual kindergarten student's creativity with sounds and writing. Stresses the importance of encouraging young children to explore written language in their own way. (RWB)

Examines cognitive development in 141 children (ages 5 to 8) and the use of pragmatic cues for anaphora resolution performed in verbal and puppet tasks with biased and neutral sentences. Violations of pragmatic constraint decreased with age and task, consistent with the perspective-shift model. Parallel function effects in neutral sentences were…

Analysis of the free speech of one- to three-year-olds (N=21) found that measures of mean length of utterance (MLU) are positively related to age, are reliable, and can predict grammatical development, although there are identifiable points in the developmental evolution of MLU and MLU-like indices beyond which their reliability and validity have…

A schizophrenic boy was studied longitudinally with regard to language behavior and hierarchic integration during 13 10-minute interviews, at 3-month intervals commencing at age 3 1/2 years and ending at 7 years of age. (Author/MC)

A study investigated a model that takes into account the influence of conceptual, cultural, and linguistic variables in formation of verbal and nonverbal concepts in bilingual children. This triple-interaction model states that concepts are represented in three ways: (1) nonverbally as abstract categories; (2) symbolically by means of…

Longitudinal and cross-sectional studies of young English-, French-, and Korean-speaking children showed that, across the three languages, children go through three similar developmental stages before they acquire the adult system of answering negative questions. Several language-specific phenomena were observed. (BC)

A naturalistic study looked at the acquisition of English by two Japanese boys, aged 4 and 8 years, during a 2.5-year stay in the United States. Data were collected through observation and transcription of spontaneous speech in daily life. Analysis included a variety of features of language use and of the acquisition process, including attitudes…