Scholars from varied disciplines--first language (L1) acquisition, second language (L2) acquisition, composition research, and cognitive psychology--have found a high level of permeability in their search for more effective classroom models of writing instruction. Among the most influential work in this area has been Stephen Krashen's theory of L2…

The booklet presents large group activities designed for severely developmentally disabled individuals. Activities are intended to meet a wide variety of ages and developmental levels and to foster opportunities for student response and participation. The first section explains a large group format entitled circle time. Themes explored in circle…

The report describes the development and field testing of the Early Social-Communication Scales (ESCS), a measure intended to reflect developmental dimensions of the at-risk infant's and toddler's adaptive interactions. The ESCS was designed to assess three major communicative functions (social interaction, joint attention, and behavior…

Evaluation activities conducted by the Hawaii State Department of Education in the Honolulu School District are described. These activities met all the requirements of the Title I Evaluation and Reporting System (TIERS). The Comprehensive Language Improvement Program (CLIP) was implemented to assist disadvantaged children. CLIP had four components…

Two claims are made concerning the interrelationship of language acquisition and socialization processes: (1) the process of acquiring language is deeply affected by the process of becoming a competent member of a society; and (2) the process of becoming a competent member of society is realized to a large extent through language and through…

This study focused on how French children aged 4, 6, and 8 years evaluate the conditions of use for modal expressions marking certainty and uncertainty in discourse. Children were shown films involving verbal interactions during which one of the protagonists produced a target utterance accusing another character of having performed a deed. Each…

This paper discusses four kinds of reasons for studying child language. The first of the four, biological reasons, includes the desire to understand our own species and its place among other living things in the universe. The common human faculty for communication, the variability in language building, and the similarity of human communication to…

A study examined use of passive and antipassive constructions in the spontaneous utterances and picture comprehension responses of young speakers of Quiche Mayan, aged 1-5. This usage was compared with use of similar constructions in English-speaking children. Quiche-speakers' usage was found to be precocious in comparison with English-speakers'…

A study examined the role of phonological regression in the language learning patterns of two toddlers. The children's phonological development was measured by inventories of the words produced at the beginning and end of an eight-week period, and distinctions were made between regressions due to cognitive factors and those due to non-cognitive…

A study examined the teaching and learning processes in the mother-child interaction that lead to the child's acquisition of the English morphemes for future and past. Data were drawn from transcripts of a mother and daughter's interaction during a period of active acquisition, age 22 to 27 months. Longitudinal microanalytic and macroanalytic…

A study investigated whether young children use sentence accent to mark new information as systematically as they have been shown to handle contrastive stress within naturally-occurring discourse. Data were drawn from the spontaneous conversations of a boy-and-girl twin pair with adults. The twins' speech was coded in carefully-defined categories…

A study investigated children's difficulty in learning color words and attempted to determine whether the difficulty was perceptual, conceptual, or linguistic. The subjects were 24 two-year-olds, half with knowledge of color words and half without, and a similar control group. The experimental subjects were given conceptual and comprehension tasks…

Focusing on language development--from beginning speech to literacy--with particular attention paid to growth in writing, this paper identifies and describes: (1) links between speech and writing; and (2) features of children's written and spoken texts that indicate growth. The process of constructing "texts" is presented as the fabric…

The distinction between core and peripheral grammar made in government-binding theory sheds light on some questions concerning the acquisition of the inflectional morphology of different languages. The schedule for acquisition of the inflectional system may be determined not by the learning of particular affixes but by whether inflection is a core…

A 9-month study of a 1-year-old child's acquisition of the pronunciation of "camera" is presented. The data show that while the child can articulate and perceive all the phonological segments of the adult form, she uses an idiosyncratic child-based form when she spontaneously draws from her lexicon to produce an utterance, systematically modifying…