A bibliography on Asian Americans contains over 100 citations of articles, papers, monographs, and books in seven categories: culture (language and customs); normal speech and language acquisition (mother-child interaction, form, content, usage, second language acquisition, cognitive development); sociolinguistics (issues, features, language…

A bibliography on Hispanic Americans contains over 200 citations of articles, papers, monographs, and books in seven categories: culture (language and customs); normal speech and language acquisition (theoretical framework, mother-child interaction, language community, form, content, usage, second language acquisition, cognitive development);…

Part of an 18-month longitudinal investigation of mother-child language-teaching interactions, this study describes changes in mothers' use of elicting strategies over time as their children's language became more complex. The focus was the adjustments mothers make to fit their behavior to their child's linguistic skills and development. Samples…

In the controversy over the conceptualization of language and verbal behavior there is an underlying unity of goals and concepts, characterized in the teaching and learning of the first language as acquisition or transmission of skills. Both the behaviorist and cognitive perspectives of learning accommodate this point of view conceptually, if not…

The paper reviews and critiques research on incidental language teaching, a method which refers to interactions between an adult and a child that arise naturally in an unstructured situation and that are used systematically by the adult to transmit new information or give the child practice in developing a communication skill. Studies of this…

The "contextual hypothesis" of French and Brown (1977) concerning children's acquisition of temporal terms was tested. French and Brown claimed that it would be impossible for children to learn the meaning of temporal terms except by hearing them used in contexts where they referred to already known sequences, and further proposed that the terms…

A study investigated children's ability to distinguish among literal, metaphorical, and anomalous comparisons. The 100 subjects, equal numbers of three-, four-, five-, and six-year-old children and college students, completed similarity statements by choosing one of two words from (1) a metaphorical/literal word pair, (2) a literal/anomalous word…

Extensive longitudinal data were gathered on a child's entry into the symbolically mediated modal world by examining changes in the semantics and pragmatics of her uses of modal auxiliary verbs. The data are 53 transcripts of natural conversations between a girl, Nina, and her mother recorded periodically from her 23rd month to her 39th month. The…

The development of relative clauses in child speech was investigated using an elicited production task instead of spontaneous speech samples. In an elicited production task, the context is manipulated so that a complex sentence must be used for communication. Thirty-six English speaking children from 3 to 5 years old were provided with contexts…

Two ideas about language as communication that can guide teachers' thinking about language, their observations of their pupils' language, and their curriculum planning activities are that (1) language is a social enterprise, and (2) language provides the means of distancing oneself from the here and now. When teachers make use of these two ideas,…

A study of children's recognitory comprehension, the rudimentary ability to begin decoding the content of language, at the end of the first year had as subjects 36 infants aged 10.5, 11.5, and 12.5 months. In an examination of monthly developmental change in their ability to comprehend newly introduced referential terms, the children were exposed…

A study of the processing of morphophonology by native speakers and second language learners focused on the processing of the Japanese potential suffix. The subjects were 13 Japanese adults (mean age 27.1) and 13 advanced learners of Japanese as a second language (mean age 26.6). The production of the potential inflection by the two subject groups…

The acquisition of several word formation devices in American Sign Language (ASL) by deaf children learning ASL as a native language focused on some devices analogous to word formation devices in spoken languages (compounding, affixation, and derivation) and some in ASL that may not have counterparts in spoken languages. They were examined using…

It is argued that the general consensus of researchers of child language that the grammatical system underlying the child's earliest multiword utterances is semantically-based, fails to provide an adequate description of even the earliest multiword utterances, and that the most sparing account of the acquisition data must include reference to…

A description of the pragmatic functions of word order in the Bantu language, Sesotho, and of how children begin to produce them illustrates the developmental trends characterizing Sesotho-speaking children's learning of different word orders. It supports findings from previous language acquisition studies that have indicated that children tend…