In a study of very young children's pronunciation of nouns and verbs, ten children aged 20 to 25 months were exposed to experimental nouns and verbs, which had not yet been comprehended or produced by the children. Each of the objects and actions was given an experimental name based on phonemes in the children's speech. These objects and actions…

A study of Korean children's interpretation of the reflexive pronoun "caki" when it precedes a third person noun phrase, that is, in backward anaphora, had as subjects 4- to 11-year-old children living in Korea. Test sentences designed on the basis of two important syntactic aspects in Korean reflexive anaphora--relational hierarchy and…

A study of the time- and aspect-marking of 24-month-old native Mandarin-speaking children analyzed their language during free play, and matched fifty utterance samples containing active predicates with all utterances using the perfective suffix "-le." It was found that the children mentioned the future, particularly their immediate intentions,…

Intended for administrators and policymakers as well as teachers, this digest explores the nature of vocabulary and its implications for classroom instruction. After defining vocabulary and discussing some of the sources of English vocabulary, the digest examines how children's vocabularies develop. It then discusses the role of vocabulary…

This study investigated the influence of the speaker's experience and addressee's developmental level on baby talk characteristics. A total of 240 mothers of only child infants (l-l8 months) or of children 2-3 years old responded to an Infant or Child Series of drawings with an attached list of sentences. Subjects described situations in drawings,…

Dialogue from 30-minute samples from "Sesame Street" and "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" was coded for grammar, content, and discourse. Grammatical analysis used the LINGQUEST computer-assisted language assessment program (Mordecai, Palen, and Palmer 1982). Content coding was based on categories developed by Rice (1984) and…

The purpose of this two section, five-part monograph is to help teachers plan and organize instruction so that objectives of language learning may be met as part of technology activities. Its intended audiences are elementary teachers, elementary language arts consultants, technology teachers who work in a team with elementary teachers, and…

A study of spontaneous language use by elementary school children and teachers in a wide range of classroom activities used a combination of observation, audiotaping, videotaping, and interviews to examine more closely the role of dialect diversity in elementary education. The study provides a more accurate and complete record of classroom life…

The phenomena of null subjects in child grammars of English are examined in the context of Nina Moss Hyams' proposals about these structures within the framework of generative grammar. Some problems with these analyses are examined and an alternative analysis is proposed. It is noted that Hyams predicts that children learning a language requiring…

Major concepts and findings related to the acquisition of early childhood bilingualism among Mexican American children are examined. Results are reported for empirical studies of bilingual acquisition, bilingual mother-child discourse, contextual and input parameters, interlanguage transfer, interactional language switching, and bilingual…

Idioglossia is a private communication system, most commonly occurring in twins. It also occurs between singletons and between other siblings of multiple births. These communication systems range from manual gestures to a fully developed vocal language with its own grammar. The literature of idioglossia is scanty and largely anecdotal. Much of the…

A study of children's language use in narratives given during play examined the longitudinal development of different linguistic systems of narrative structure: pronominal, clausal, and temporal. The narrative and dialogue in play with small toy figures was observed in eight children between the ages of 2 and 7. The findings suggest certain…

A study looks at young children's responses to tough movement structures, focusing on complements to "easy." The study examines the development of the two major types of rule usage: primitive and adult, and focuses on the inconsistent fluctuations between the primitive and adult levels. It is proposed that the source of complexity in…

A study investigated Japanese 3-to-5-year-olds' comprehension of sentences using the temporal terms "before" and "after" and examined whether contextual information helped the children respond correctly. The children were asked to perform a task with a toy either before or after performing another task with a different toy.…

This study attempted to clarify the kind of correlations that can be found in the speech behavior of high-risk children in comparison with children without neonatal risk complications. The study concentrated on the articulatory ability of 430 five-year-old children with neonatal risk complications; it applied a cross-disciplinary diagnosis (child…